Picking a Hard Drive and RAID

[delta013]

Hello everyone.

I hope this is the right place for this. I figured the hard drive and storage folder was primarily for hard drive problems, not recommendations.

I am planning on building a new PC soon and I am almost done selecting my parts. One thing I am stuck on however, is the hard drive.

This computer will be used for heavy gaming, as well as large file storage and moderate video editing/encoding. So with respect to the hard drive system I would like something that can boot fast, load programs/games fast and have some redundancy to prevent data loss. For this reason I was thinking of a RAID 10 array with 4 hard drives, with each drive having somewhere around 250GB +/- of space. This, if I understand RAID correctly, will give me 500GB of mirrored storage with striping.

Using Raptors would be nice but they’re not big enough yet. So I have been looking at 7200 RPM SATA drives on Tom’s Hardware Guide in this article. The problem is that there is no clear winner. Some drives that are the best in one benchmark, do badly in others. I am also confused as to what exact the different benchmarks mean. THG tests I/O performance, access time, interface bandwidth and read/wire transfer performance.

I understand what access time is, but do not know how important it is to overall performance, and I don’t understand how the others differ from each other, when they all sound like the same thing.

I would appreciate it if someone here can explain what these benchmarks reflect and which ones I should pay attention to for my needs. THG currently recommends building new systems around the Western Digital WD3200JD 320GB. What would everyone here recommend?

Also do you think RAID 10 is right for me?

Thanks.

Delta013

[jayb1234]

Look at the 7200 rpm 16 Mb cache drives, they perform almost as well as the Raptors. There are a few with Sata 3.0 Gb/sec , but they are pretty pricey. Seagate or Western digital would be my choices.

[delta013]

Originally Posted by jayb1234 Look at the 7200 rpm 16 Mb cache drives, they perform almost as well as the Raptors. There are a few with Sata 3.0 Gb/sec , but they are pretty pricey. Seagate or Western digital would be my choices.

Thanks for replying. It helps alot. I am now thinking about the WD2500KS, which is 250 GB, SATA II and has 16 MB cache.

More opinions are still welcome.