want to buy a new harddrive tommorow

hey all,

i am looking to buy a new harddrive tommorow. money aint really an issue and the computer is only used for gaming. can i have any advice on what to buy. western digtal or segate. i was thinking of 1 velocoraptor (os and games) and then 2 segate barracuda in raid0 (storage) is that just overkill.

any advice would be appreciated on model anything.
thanks alot

If its storage, why bother with AID0? If you've got the money to burn, get the vel for your OS/games, and simply buy whatever drives for storage. Its for storage, you don't need AID0 or super fast drives.

so basically is raid0 not worth it then. i thought raid would be another alternative to the velo.

ok thanks alot of help just two more question
1)for ssd the ones i am seeing in the store near me are only 32gig is that big enough for vista/games/application
2)if i get the vel is there a proper way to partition it and if so how much space for each partition

I would get the Veloci for OS and either 1 or 2 Western Digital 6401AALS for Storage.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136319

If you want gaming performance, your first choice is about the best.
Expensive, but I like it.
However, I wouldn't do it. The performance you will get is really small over a single 1 tb. drive, for gaming.
Foget about SSDs for now. They need to come a ways before you invest in one. They are not quite ready for main stream use yet.

What I like even better is simply putting 2 of these into RAID.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822136218
They are fast, and a great price.

When buying a hard drive, I would refer to these charts:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] ks,24.html

First, re raid:
There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki- [...] iveVsRaid0
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

How much space do you think you will need for the three games and the OS?

Get a fast drive for that, and add a storage drive of sufficient capacity for the rest.

If 80gb will be enough for the OS and 3 games, then the fastest solution will be the Intel X25-M SSD. It will cost you about $600. If price were really no object, get two of them in raid-0 for 160gb. Raid-0 in this case is good because the SSD does not have the positioning penalty of conventional hard drives. Do not get any other MLC SSD. You will suffer an unacceptable write penalty. Only Inttel has a proper MLS controller today. Slc drives worl well, but are much more expensive.

On a more practical matter, the 300gb Velociraptor is a very good solution. Go to www.storagereview.com and look at their performance database. The system drivemark performance is probably the best indicator of what performance will be for the single user desktop. The synthetic benchmarks like HDTACH and HDTUNE are poor indicators of what real application performance will be.

In the end, though, your gaming performance it most directly related to the power of your vga configuration, not the hard drive or even the CPU. If it is not at the GTX280 level or better, spend your money there.

---good luck---

i have one also as a storage drive and i can't hear it... my pc is almost dead silent(cant hear it at 2meters at night) and the f1 1TB with aam enabled is whisper quiet providing that you have it soft mounted. it's the best for storage... very fast linear read/write... nice for movies/iso's...


My choice would be RAID0 2x320GB single plate hdd's.. either WD or Seagate's 7200.11 for the OS and app's... Nice IO's. and F1 1TB for storage. it wont be the better brand you can buy for reliability but i have no complaints about the F1 1TB hard drives... but i still prefer Seagate over any other in that departement. i'm looking forward to grab their 11 series... or Maxtor Maxline brother. The only reason that i backed from a 4X single Plate 80GB RAID0 to a Seagate 320GB single plate was because of noise. i work with 15k cheeta's(i miss those quantum 10k drives...) in raid... non raid.. etc... raptors and all. i love 15k hdd's it's just that leap in performance that's been missing from consumer world... but then again... it's just too much noise. And Yes. to me RAID is worth it. the system is way much responsive. Dont bring the 4/8GB mem as an excuse. what for?? i have 8GB now and altough it's faster and smoother than say... 2gb it doesnt reach the benefit's of a enterprise class HDD or RAID for that matter. dont skimp on HDD. if possible buy 2 150GB velociraptors for 200€ each and 1TB HDD for 110€ and your off to a great machine. and vista will come alive even before super ultra caching everything to mem.