Best hard setup? [i7-920 with asus p6t win7]

[al4x]

ive recently built myself a new i7-920 comp an dwanted to know the best HDD setup

ive considered SSD but with costs and large games its a no no

ive also looked at raid, but been advised its not really reliable! [unless this is untrue!]

atm im booting from a 1.5tb seagate 7200.11 drive but it doesnt seem that quick!

whats the quickest +1TB drive out there and best configuration to have it in? [unless raid is as worthless as ive heard?]

ive an asus p6t se mainboard

 

[skulkingghost]

I have the same mobo, and I had the same issue and went the ssd route. I bought a 120gb one but you could go with a cheaper one. What I do is cycle the 3 games I am playing at the moment on the ssd, then I have things like my complete steam collection, etc on the other drives. Having the single ssd as a boot drive / email (postbox) / firefox / photoshop / a few games and then a tb as storage / older games /etc... seems to be the best option I have discovered and I have never really had an issue. If you dont mind spending $200 the intell ssd is a good option.

You could get two matching tb hard drives and put them in raid, that would speed it up too I am sure. I have 5 WD Green 1tb drives in this machine and while they arent in raid, access times, especially for steam games are fine.

 

[al4x]

its just too expensive compared to hard drives [as yet] imo, id be looking at at least a 120gb, which is about 3 times the price of a 2TB mechanical drive! maybe in a years time when they are cheaper,

i can get 120gb ssd for the same price as 6TB of mechanical drives, i just cant justify it atm

 

[Old Hippie]

IMHO, the best HD set-up is and always will be a nice small fast drive for your OS and programs and a large "Green" drive for your data and back-ups.

If you can't afford an SSD for the OS drive go for a 150GB VR.

 

[al4x]

i wa just going to ask this, is a small drive ;ike you said better than a big drive?

is the reasoning behind this to do with random access and a smaller area to search?

edt, how much of a real-life improvement would i see over my 1.5tb seagate 7200.11 do you think id see in program launch and OS boot? [im looking at the 300gb version]

 

[Old Hippie]

A small drive doesn't inherently have faster access times but it's much easier to image for back-ups and by keeping just your OS and programs on there you'll have your data safe on another drive.

how much of a real-life improvement would i see over my 1.5tb seagate 7200.11 do you think id see in program launch and OS boot?

Depends upon your defination of improvement. I've seen some disappointed with SSDs while I think mine are a great improvement even coming from a VR.

Although the VRs still have the fastest access times for mechanical drives their sustained read/write speeds are equaled by some of the newer drives.

You can compare these two drives here. Notice that the VR has @ 1/2 of the access times of the Seagate which would make everything much snappier.

There's soo many variables with HD set-ups and no one configuration is gonna fit everybody's needs.

I've always used the seperate OS drive scenario but with the introduction of these smaller SSDs many are moving to this type of configuration.

 

[al4x]

im going to try and get a VR 300gb for os and apps, the 128gb SSDs are very expensive and i still wouldnt fit all my OS and apps on them,

is RAID worth it at all? or is risk of data corruption just too high?

 

[Makaveli]

So you actually have an OS install with applications that uses more than 128GB if you don't count games?

Because that should be more than enough room for most if you are installing the games to a platter based hard drive.

 

[Old Hippie]

is RAID worth it at all?

I'm assuming you're talkin' RAID0 and that's a whole new ball game that I wouldn't recommend to a novice user.

I have Vista with about 15-20 programs installed and it's under 30GB. There's no need to have your games installed on an SSD.

 

[al4x]

128gb drives are still almost £200 for the cheapest ones, without games i would need the 128 64 would probably be full, maybe could get them on a 64gb

yeah raid 0, thats why i was asking ive been advised aganst it and dont know much more than the basics,

i have windows 7 64bit

edt, ive just had a look, can def get all programs and os [w/o games] on 64gb

 

[Old Hippie]

I believe the minimum requirements for disk space listed to install Windows 7 on is 16 GB for 32-bit and 20 GB for 64-bit Windows 7 but I've seen the actual install under 10GB.

You must have some big programs to fill a 64GB install without games.

 

[YBS1]

Raid isn't any less reliable than the individual drives used in it. I've had hdd failures before, but as luck may have it, never has it been a hdd in a raid 0 array. That being said, raid isn't going to improve your boot times and will likely even increase them slightly. If your concern is game level loading this is one real world example where raid 0 probably will improve over a single disk, as raid 0 shines at sequential reads.

If you really want speed you're going to have to move to SSD. I'm now running two SSD's in a raid 0 array. My OS, apps, and frequently played games reside there. When a game or large app becomes less frequently used I move it over to my 1TB caviar black by using link shell extensions. This way it frees up valuable SSD space and doesn't mess up the game/apps working install path.

 

[al4x]

ive decided for now im going to use a 300gb VR drive for my OS and programs [inc games] and other large HDDs as archive
then when SSDs become cheaper im going to get a 64gb SSD for OS and programs, the 300GB VR can be for games etc and any other HDD can be used for archive

sound like an ok idea?