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Couple newbie questions

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DeathScytheVT

Member
Hey guys, just built my first comp a month ago and it's running smoothly, but wondering if I could get a lil help with a couple things.

First, I've noticed that out of the whole case, my CPU fan is the loudest of them all, and also it still seems to be fairly warm in there (I'm using stock cooling on my AMD 3200+). I've been told if I ever want to OC, I should upgrade the fan and heatsink, but i'm not sure on how overclocking works, nor what type of cooling to look for. The stock one came with a mounting bracket and everything, would I need to replace that, or would the new one just snap into place?

Also, wondering about HDDs. I have a 200GB seagate 7200 RPM, but keep reading about people running dual 120's with RAID or something to keep backups. I've heard of RAID before but very unclear as to what exactly it is. Does it auto-backup everything you do? And if so, wouldn't that slow down the comp a lot?

Thanks for any help you could give, if something's unclear I'll try to clarify my question for ya ^_^
 
RAID is "redundant array of inexpensive disks. The two most popular implementations of RAID in desktops are RAID 0 and RAID 1. RAID 0 is referred to as disk striping. What it does is combines two or more hard drives into one virtual drive. When data is written to the RAID array the system will segment the data into blocks. Then it will write the different blocks to the hard drives simultaneously. So a file could have pieces of it spread out among all the hard drives in the RAID 0 system. This results in faster read/write times since the data is being written to/read from multiple drives simultaneously.

RAID 1 is referred to as disk mirroring. Essentially, every time you save a file or some other piece of data to a hard drive the entire file will be written to both hard drives in your system simultaneously. Every time something is written to one drive, it gets written to the other drive in your array. This is an excellent configuration for backups since all your data gets duplicated instantaneously.
 
Originally posted by: DeathScytheVT
Hey guys, just built my first comp a month ago and it's running smoothly, but wondering if I could get a lil help with a couple things.

First, I've noticed that out of the whole case, my CPU fan is the loudest of them all, and also it still seems to be fairly warm in there (I'm using stock cooling on my AMD 3200+). I've been told if I ever want to OC, I should upgrade the fan and heatsink, but i'm not sure on how overclocking works, nor what type of cooling to look for. The stock one came with a mounting bracket and everything, would I need to replace that, or would the new one just snap into place?

Also, wondering about HDDs. I have a 200GB seagate 7200 RPM, but keep reading about people running dual 120's with RAID or something to keep backups. I've heard of RAID before but very unclear as to what exactly it is. Does it auto-backup everything you do? And if so, wouldn't that slow down the comp a lot?

Thanks for any help you could give, if something's unclear I'll try to clarify my question for ya ^_^
Click to expand...

Are you sure about your CPU fan being the loudest component in your system? In my experience the video card was twice as loud as anything else in the system. When I switched it to the NV5 silencer my overall noise levels dropped dramatically. Now I find that the stock CPU fan provides adequate cooling at a decent noise level even with a moderate overclock. A lot of people on this forum are overclocking with stock HSF's. Since you have the stock solution already you might want to try overclocking with it before ripping it out.

Also, you might want to think about enabling Cool 'n' Quiet and see if there are any changes in noise/temps.

 
I was actually just reading up about video card fans being loud, and I'm looking at upgrading it.
Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer, Model "AVC-1000 REV.3" seems to be reccomended that I've seen (Any thoughts)?

Also with the RAID, does RAID 1 slow everything down, since it's writing to both drives at once, or would it not be much of a problem? I'm just looking for a nice way to keep a solid backup of my files. My drive's a plain ATA one, not SATA, would that matter?

And the necessary stupid question: How do I go about enabling said RAID? And what is this "Cool n' Quiet" feature for the fans?

Thanks for the help ^_^
 
Another thing I forgot to ask: If you enable RAID 1, will it automatically copy everything from the first disc onto the second, or would I need to have another program to do that first?
 
That's a good question. I have never used RAID before, only read up on it. Based on my understanding of how it functions, my guess is that it would not copy anything currently saved from one disk to the other. It will only duplicate anything that gets written going forward.
 
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