inflames988
12-19-2007, 02:05 PM
Currently my desktop has the following drives:
1 x 320GB WD (SATA II)
2 x 320GB Seagate (SATA II)
1 x 250GB Maxtor (PATA)
(all have 16MB cache)
I will also be adding two new drives, Seagate 500GB SATA II drives with 32MB cache, which i just ordered on newegg.
Im looking to set up at LEAST one (if not two) RAID 0 partitions (since i have two of the same seagate 320GB drives and two of the same seagate 500GB drives). My question is how you guys would reccomend setting this whole thing up.
Would it be better to use the 500GB drives in RAID 0 as the boot drive? (I will probably be dual or triple booting, XP Professional, Ubuntu 7.10, and possibly windows Vista later on). I usually prefer to keep the boot drive as small as possible, but these drives are newer and have more cache. Will this offer any performance increase over the 320GB drives w/ only 16mb cache?
Secondly, Is there any real benefit to putting the "other two" drives (whichever ones I DONT use for the O/S) in RAID 0? I use the computer for alot of media related stuff - have my whole DVD collection on there so that I dont have to bring it to school with me, as well as a pretty vast collection of music. I also plan to begin ripping all my CD's into itunes in "lossless" format, which will take a fair amount of space. I prefer to have several "large" partitions rather than multiple small ones, so RAID 0 is ideal, but at the same time if there is not much of a performance benefit I would probably be more comfortable keeping them separate, since if one drive crashes in RAID 0 I will be out of luck. I try to back up as much as possible, but I can usually only do this for important documents since I have so many large files (DVD's, etc) on the HDD. I figure if a drive goes out, I can always rip the DVDs again from the originals at my house if worst comes to worst.
any other suggestions on how I should configure all these drives (in addition to the questions above) would be great.
1 x 320GB WD (SATA II)
2 x 320GB Seagate (SATA II)
1 x 250GB Maxtor (PATA)
(all have 16MB cache)
I will also be adding two new drives, Seagate 500GB SATA II drives with 32MB cache, which i just ordered on newegg.
Im looking to set up at LEAST one (if not two) RAID 0 partitions (since i have two of the same seagate 320GB drives and two of the same seagate 500GB drives). My question is how you guys would reccomend setting this whole thing up.
Would it be better to use the 500GB drives in RAID 0 as the boot drive? (I will probably be dual or triple booting, XP Professional, Ubuntu 7.10, and possibly windows Vista later on). I usually prefer to keep the boot drive as small as possible, but these drives are newer and have more cache. Will this offer any performance increase over the 320GB drives w/ only 16mb cache?
Secondly, Is there any real benefit to putting the "other two" drives (whichever ones I DONT use for the O/S) in RAID 0? I use the computer for alot of media related stuff - have my whole DVD collection on there so that I dont have to bring it to school with me, as well as a pretty vast collection of music. I also plan to begin ripping all my CD's into itunes in "lossless" format, which will take a fair amount of space. I prefer to have several "large" partitions rather than multiple small ones, so RAID 0 is ideal, but at the same time if there is not much of a performance benefit I would probably be more comfortable keeping them separate, since if one drive crashes in RAID 0 I will be out of luck. I try to back up as much as possible, but I can usually only do this for important documents since I have so many large files (DVD's, etc) on the HDD. I figure if a drive goes out, I can always rip the DVDs again from the originals at my house if worst comes to worst.
any other suggestions on how I should configure all these drives (in addition to the questions above) would be great.