A little Hard drive advice please...

[bandit3333]

I am running a Dell 8400 with a Seagate 160Gb SATA HD. I am looking for a bit more in HD performance. I can get another 160Gb Seagate SATA HD for $49.00 after rebate and set up RAID 0 or I can buy a 74Gb WD Raptor for $163.00 after rebate and set this up as my primary drive and use the Seagate for storage... Or... I could buy 2 Maxtor Diamondmax 10 200Gb 16Mb cache SATA HD's in Raid 0 for $182.00. ANY and ALL advice or comments would be welcome. This is my first post and I would like to say hello to all! Thanks

 

[w00t]

is your seagate sata? raptor's are a waste of money and maxtors suck to teh maxtor.

 

[bandit3333]

Yes, the Seagate is SATA. Thank you

 

[bob4432]

raid 0 is not going to really benefit you except in benchmarks or if you are transfering large (like 1GB) files around all the time, plus you increase your risk of failure because if one hdd dies, the array dies.

the only way to get more performance is to go either a raptor or scsi. there is a significant price for this performance increase and that is what you need to determine for yourself if it is worth it to you. is the performance worth the price? even though a raptor's str is not as high or much higher than modern newest gen 7200rpm hdds, the seek times are noticeable, same thing with 10krpm scsi.

if you truely want serious hdd performance, get a 15krpm u320 scsi hdds and u160/320 scsi card. this will set you back ~$150-$200 for a one gen old 36GB u320 scsi hdd and a u160 card. this is the ultimate, but is expensive.

personally, i love my 10krpm scsi hdd and am looking for a good deal on a 15krpm model to replace it with, but that is me and my opinions are not for everyone.

also, welcome to the forums