New Hard Drive Recommendations?

akane1984 · 21-08-2005, 11:11

I currently have a Maxtor SATA 120gb. . iam looking to make this my slave drive and buy in new Master drive. any ideas people, what is best and most affordable drives...friends tell me to go raid and others tell me to go western digital for the 10,000rpm. .

SMHarman · 21-08-2005, 11:15

What do you want to do with the drive?
You only need a 10k drive if you play games and want maps to load at lightning speed.
Raid 1 is good for ensuring you don't loose data (but you need 2 HDDs) Raid 0 is good for Video Editing and things, but increases the mean time to failiure as if either drive fails you lose the content of both.

If you just want more storage space then a new Maxtor with as many Gb as you need and an 8Mb cache and 7200 RPM will do you right.

akane1984 · 21-08-2005, 11:30

yeah so if i got another 120Gb i could set up raid 1? is it easy enough to do? i have maxblast downloaded so i can clone hard drives.

SMHarman · 21-08-2005, 12:50

It's easy if the MOBO supports it, but why do you want / need it.

akane1984 · 21-08-2005, 15:41

current hard drive has become very noisey and sometimes crashes. . and has to peform numerous checkdisk, would like to clone windows onto new hard drive and then format current one.

Stuart · 21-08-2005, 15:58

akane1984, TBH, I would think about buying a new hard drive to REPLACE your current hdd as it sounds like your current HDD is failing.

SMHarman · 21-08-2005, 17:02

to add to what Stuart says above, putting that in a RAID 0 array could thus spell disaster to the content of that and the other half of the array.

.jackson · 22-08-2005, 09:34

I have looked into raid when getting a new hard drive. I am a gamer so I want fast loads and no HDD lag in game.

I researched it and found that you get better performance from getting a quick primary drive, I got a Maxtor MaxLine III 16MB cache 300GB SATA drive, and used my old 80GB barracuda for windows page file.

You dont get much performance from RAID 0 unless you move large files around all the time. I wouldnt bother with RAID. I would get a 16MB cache drive, because they are as fast as hell! Also in benchmarks my maxline beats the raptor's in some cases.

akane1984 · 22-08-2005, 23:01

sweet, how much do they sting you? and how did you set up your other drive to be page file does this boost performance of general PC

.jackson · 23-08-2005, 18:20

Unless you have over 1GB RAM...it boosts your perfomance considerably. If will boost it anyway if you have 1GB RAM but not much.

Do set page file on a different drive other than what windows is installed on;

Right click me computer > Properties > Performance Settings > Advanced > Advanced > Change > Select the drive for page file.

If you have 1GB RAM, then set a custom size of 1536MB.

The Maxline III drive (only in SATA, do you have SATA?) sets you back quite a bit I am afraid; Link (The decription is wrong on this site, the HDD actually has a 16MB cache)