Advice on my HDD configuration?

223 Views 3 Replies 4 Participants Last post by aliadn, Mar 3, 2009

MNiceGuy

Discussion Starter · Mar 3, 2009

I've been thinking about my HDD setup lately and I'm wondering if some changes can be made to get much better performance. For purposes of the thread let's assume I don't HAVE to retain my current hardware.

Right now I have this:

x1 Samsung Spinpoint 320GB (Primary OS). It's nice and quiet but it seems noticeably slower than the Raptor I had before. Vista gives it a 5.7 compared to the Raptor's 5.9 too by the way.

x2 WD Blue 500GB (Storage). It's mainly media strewn across these two drives. As I write this I'm using 36% of one and 71% of the other. I add to these frequently.

Now...

I've been thinking about going RAID 0 and backing the OS on a FireWire external I have. Thing is I know some drives fare better than others for this. I want to keep the budget as low as possible while getting good overall performance. I need 150+GB on the primary drive.

Right now I'm looking at the WD 640GB Blue drives. I seem to remember reading they are good performers but I'm wondering if there are any lower capacity drives that will come close. I just don't need 1+TB for an OS drive.

For the storage drives I was thinking about mirroring two Terabyte drives. Is it possible to have one RAID 0 array and one RAID 1 array simultaneously on ICH10R?

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bruestle2

· #2 · Mar 3, 2009

The best speed you can get out of any drive is from the Seagate 320GB 7200.11 drive. You will want the one with higher cache. Tom's hardware has a nice HD benchmark chart. These drives are the fastest read/write out there (short of a velociraptor), but also have some of the lowest seek times (18ms).

For your case, however, i would suggest getting another 320GB Spinpoint drive for the RAID 0. You want identical drives for any RAID array, they perform much better if this is the case.

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eflyguy

· #3 · Mar 3, 2009

I get 12.7 ave seek on my 7200.11's..
..a

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aliadn

· #4 · Mar 3, 2009

The most cost-effective solution would be to get 2 small drives (around $30-$40 each on Newegg) and RAID 0 them. Since it is only going to be your OS and other applications that you should have the CD's to back them up with, data reliability isnt as big of an issue as with your storage unit. You could even get more drives and integrate them into RAID to increase speeds and space.

There are Seagate 7200.11 160g drives that perform well, any name brand will perform relatively similar.

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