Which do you think will be better? 2 X 160 GB Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 SATA 7200rpm UDMA150 8MB Cache; In RAID (suggestions as to which) or a single 300 GB Maxtor Diamondmax 10 SATA 7200rpm UDMA150 16MB Cache Thanks for your help and suggestions
74gig Raptor for boot. You dont need speed for storage, and you dont need 300gig of space for an OS drive.
Don't RAID. Simple as that. Period. . I would agree with Bindi, although 74gig Raptors are a tich out of most people's price range. Grab a good SATA drive, such as this for OS/documents/media files, and this for programs and other storage (I understand everyone can't get things from Newegg, It's just easiest for me to give examples from, and products are products). That way, you get SATA interface, and tons of storage. Plus, I just bought my first Seagate drive and can't recommend them enough .
a stripped raid will be faster, but there is always data loss fun (if one drive goes, u lose em both). if you can afford a RAID-10 then its all okay! (10 been mirred & stripped). Myself i don't trust maxtor any more, lost too many drives, i've only got 2 in service, and i don't intend to buy any more!
Go with the Diamondmax 10 drive, it has NCQ and the 16MB cache; clearly a smart schoice for 300GB of storage.
Agreed. I've done it and wished I hadn't more than once. Well RAID0 is something to avoid, anything else is fine as it's actually redundant in some form or another. bindi, to be quite honest raptors don't really do that much good in a home users or gamers environment. Perhaps a couple seconds off of game load times but having used both 7200 and 10000rpm drives at home, it's really not worth it. If you do huge photoshop type work then it will likely be a lot more useful. Don't get me wrong they're nice drives but the price/GB is just terrible... 3-4x what most other drives are save the new 400GB ones. Granted I've never done a "fair" comparison but they really don't feel any faster. I'd personally say two 160gb's but don't raid them, just so you can have a tiny bit more peace of mind knowing you only lose half your files if one dies. Although you get the 16MB cache on the 300GB which is really nice. If your mobo supports NCQ (ie 9x5 and nForce4 series) then definately go with it. Actually... get that one anyways because you'll upgrade at some point. I know my next purchase as far as hard drives goes is looking to be at least 200GB and supporting NCQ. If your board does support NCQ, I'm not sure if it's automatically enabled if the drive supports it though. Check the properties of the SATA controller in the device manager to check once the drive is installed.
Thanks for the help guys! (and the time Firehead ) Yeah i've just ordered a nforce 4 mobo, Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9. Mainly its going to be for gaming and some media and pictures etc. So thinking the 300GB rather than the dual 160GB, in raid, or just dual.?
I'm trying to keep my rig as silent as possible, ae the raptors quite quiet? I've heard the samsung spinpoints are rather quiet?
No, not really, but get some sound insulation and make sure the sides are on and its pretty good. Also, if you want it as quiet as possible, surely you want 1 drive, not 2.
Thanks In that case it comes down to the choice of either a 74GB raptor with sound insulation or a 160GB Samsung spinpoint? Can you suggest any sound insulation for an antec plusview tower case?
I totally disagree. Unless you go for a 15k SCSI drive (if u dont mind your ears bleeding) your SCSI RAID 0 is uber expensive to get a decent card and drives and youll be piping it through the PCI bus. Stick a raptor on a native SATA and youll get better burst rates (meh) and still quite high sustained reads - check the HDD benchmark thread. For the cost and easy of use, they kill a SCSI setup in a workstation. Not to mention you dont have to worry about termination or fat P// cables.
R U sure the new nForce 4 Mobo's support NCQ?? Is SATA 3Gb/s the same as NCQ? I would go for the 300GB DM10 Very nice drive.. Matt
*coughs* i returned my raptors, i bought 4. all 36gig. they were pathetic, and made more noise than my 15krpm seagates. i have spiffy board, it has dual channel on board scsi, with ZCR raid. as you can imagne the shop hated me (if i hadn't bought them on hte grounds i could trial them!) The HDD bench thread is a bit pointless, for more info read some notes on how you bench HDDs, and you will get the idea (you can't just CLI, the reg gets anoyed). important point, RAID is VERY VERY GOOD, until a drive fails. SMART can give you ample notice, and jinkies, we are in the age of the backup! But just look at feedbacks on online shops like ebuyer for how many raptors die. my rounded SCSI cables look the same as a rounded PATA. Yes the terminator is about 3cm length, how unslightly! The SCSI build quality of drives is generally better, i've had to return countless IDE drives to maxtor (because they suck), but the one SCSI i had to return went so much faster, and smoother. Okay SCSI costs a lot, but its well worth it, certianly makes the raptors speed look silly.
