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Well, I'm finishing up the specs for my new pc system, and now I got one little question. I was thinking about maybe have Raid 0 set up, with 2 WD 40GB 400JB(8mb buffer) Hard drives. But since I dont know much about Raid, except that it supposed to make data access even faster? , is it a good idea to have it? Or I'm better with 1 80 GB hard drive instead?
I would try to help, but I forgot which type of volume Raid 0 is :p
its like another ide plug, i have it on my mobo i am running an 80gig WD on it and it works fine, its mainly used for servers or when you add several other hd's.
No.
RAID 0 = BAD.
Starting off, RAID is generally meant more for fault-protection than for speeding up data access. Most places use it for drives with critical data. RAID 0, however, is the exception. RAID 0 basically stripes your data across both drives, so it looks like you have one 80 GB drive. The problem is that there's no redundancy; if one drive goes, you're screwed.
With two drives, you can have them set up as RAID 1, which means they'll be mirroring each other. That way, if a drive dies, you can replace it with a like drive and your data will still be safe on the other drive. Problem is, it'll only look like one 40 GB drive.
Now, if you want striping and redundancy, get a third drive and put them as RAID 5. It's striping with parity... it'll look like one 80 GB drive (40 GB + 40 GB + 40 GB used for parity; one drive's worth is always used for that), but if a drive dies you can pop another in and the other drives will reconstruct the data lost from the one replaced.
All that said... if you're looking at a pure performance issue, I'd probably say get the 80 GB because it's more hassle-free and possibly cheaper too. :p
Just my $.02...
Just pop in an 80GB Western Digital(actually, the new Maxtors have 8MB of cache as well...). 7200RPM, of course. Cheap, fast, lots of storage.
You might even want to go higher if you want to get into digital media, video, etc.
Thanks guys :p
I will probabably just get 80 gig drive, it should save me about $60.
Consumer RAID cards aren't that great, at least none that i've heard of anyway. RAID 0 would definatly be faster, but not as much as it should be in theory because of cheap cards taking too much overhead. For a personal system RAID is generally unneccessary.
Echoing what Andy said, yes, a RAID configuration is only good if you have info you absolutley have to keep safe (I doubt your saved games in Warcraft count as critical data). As far as performance goes, stick with an 80 gig drive, 7200 rpm, and you'll be able to handle anything in terms of gaming or consumer aps. If you look into digital media, then consider a RAID, but only if your job/livelihood depends on it.
I got one of those from Fry's last week. Runs great so far. Very fast and ultra-quiet.Quote:
Originally posted by andyrose
Just pop in an 80GB Western Digital(actually, the new Maxtors have 8MB of cache as well...). 7200RPM, of course. Cheap, fast, lots of storage.
Cool. Thanks again :)