Deciding on my primary hard drive

[SlyOnes]

Well, as part of my new XPS system I got two new hard drives in addition to the one I already had. The original drive that I had before is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 320GB hard drive. The new two that I have are Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 7200RPM drives, manufactured in April of this year. The new system came with the two 500gb drives set in a Raid 1 configuration. To be blunt, things haven't felt right with the new system and having just hooked up my Barracuda again for a bit, it "feels" more snappy and responsive. This could all be some massive placebo effect, which is why I started looking online for information/reviews of the drives. I am pretty savvy when it comes to video cards and CPUs, but when it comes to hard drives and RAID, all of the information I just looked through has only succeeded in giving me a headache.

So far I have tried both the drives in Raid 1 and I have tried one of the 500gb drives alone. They both felt a bit less responsive than my other drive but I really cannot be sure (honestly it could be the two different sets of nvidia video drivers I am using). I deal with a lot of games such as Oblivion and World of Warcraft which I assume load from the hard drive quite a bit as they are open world/streaming games and I want to get the best experience out of all of this.

Basically, as far as single drives go, is my Barracuda better/faster or is the Hitachi?

Secondly, in terms of Raid. In Raid 1, is it in any way slower than just running them both on their own without Raid? Because if the hitachi is the same or better than the Barracuda, I would just keep it in Raid 1 and then just remove one drive if there were any issues.

Lastly, could I just skip the whole thing by setting my two 500s to Raid 0? Would that end up being faster in every way than either on their own? If so, my main concern is with reliability. I mainly use my PC for gaming and would hold important documents on another drive, but how much more likely will it be for one of the drives to die as opposed to the chances of them both dying separately out of raid on their own? I don't care about losing data if one dies, but I don't know how much more likely it is for them to die by being in Raid 0.

For extra information, this is an XPS 710 H2C with some Frankenstein nforce motherboard modified by Dell and the raid array is setup through the nvidia mediashield bios application, not the program in the OS itself.

As can be seen, I have been left a little out of it by everything I have been reading tonight. I am hoping current up to date feedback might help me out a bit. Thank you in advance.

 

[RebateMonger]

You are all over the place with those drive combinations.

What do you WANT to accomplish?

If you want data security, then take one or two of the drives, put them in external drive housings, and make periodic backups of important data.

Arrange the remaining (internal) drives however you want. As long as you have backups, there's no huge need for RAID 1 on your primary drives. RAID 0 greatly increases the odds of array and data loss, but if you keep backups it's not a huge deal.

The simplest and most trouble-free setup is attaching single drives, with no RAID. If you set it up that way, and keep ongoing backups on those external drives, we'll probably never hear from you again here. Those 500GB drives, even by themselves, are supposed to be pretty fast.

 

[SlyOnes]

I initially had another long response that was going nowhere, but I instead decided to narrow this down to one question. I have had so many hardware issues recently. From my Xbox's that enjoy to simply die after a couple hours of usage, to the nonstop torment of dealing with my last PC. I have become so aware of the stupidest little stutters, skips and slowdowns that I have really lost sight of actually playing games to play them. But no longer.

Basically, forget the Raid. All I ever hear is how it really doesn't benefit much of anything and can in some cases harm more than help.

I started using a single drive and I figure I might as well continue using one.

Basically, I have not been able to find out what drive is faster/better. My 7200.10 Barracuda 320GB or my Hitachi 500gb Deskstar. I have looked for quite awhile and I would most appreciate anyone who has good knowledge with harddrives helping me out.

Essentially I wish to know which is recommended as the overall faster, better drive that would be best for every day computing and especially gaming needs. I guess I really want to use the 500gb, but since having used the 320 before and feeling a "difference", I guess I want a second opinion on if I am shooting myself in the foot by not using the 320 or if there will barely be a difference.

 

[RebateMonger]

Please do NOT consider me an expert in drive speed. It's not something that I normally deal with:

2) Somebody else will have to answer that question. Look up reviews in Storage Review.

1) RAID 1 can be a bit slower than no RAID. It's going to depend on your drive controller. Reads can be faster IF your controller can read from both drives at once.

3) Faster in EVERY WAY? No. Overall, it won't be any slower than a single drive, and some operations will be faster. Whether you'll see those differences will depend on how you use your PC.

4) The chances of single drive failure are about the same no matter what sort of array you use. The problem with RAID 0 is that one failed drive takes out the entire array. So you (roughly) double your odds of losing your data when using a RAID 0 array versus no array at all. And, overall, any form of RAID introduces new forms of failures caused by the complexity of the system when compared to a single-drive system.