Hard Drive Configurations - Ideas?

[Splitfyre]

Hey Gang,

I have a friend getting a new computer and he's going with two 250GB SATA drives. Since he's got 4 slots for hard drives on his system. What effect would the following have?

- RAID Two 250GB SATA drives
- Install his old 14GB IDE drive as a SWAP drive

Thoughts?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Slow down his computer terribly... Just FYI, I've got 5 drivers in RAID 5 (SATA), and I'm still getting 3 of the fastest drives I can find to put in RAID 0 for a temp / swap drive. You don't want something used as often as your swap to be your slowest. So my advice would be to just dump the 14gb, and give them to someone who could actually use them, instead of just having them around.

As far as the RAID stuff... Do you have to RAID them? I would just connect them in there, and have two SATA 250gb hds. Does your friend have any specific reason for going RAID? Just checking.
Tas.

 

[nweaver]

Originally posted by: tasburrfoot78362
Slow down his computer terribly... Just FYI, I've got 5 drivers in RAID 5 (SATA), and I'm still getting 3 of the fastest drives I can find to put in RAID 0 for a temp / swap drive. You don't want something used as often as your swap to be your slowest. So my advice would be to just dump the 14gb, and give them to someone who could actually use them, instead of just having them around.

As far as the RAID stuff... Do you have to RAID them? I would just connect them in there, and have two SATA 250gb hds. Does your friend have any specific reason for going RAID? Just checking.
Tas.

If you are hitting swap that often you need to get more ram

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Not necessarily... Windows uses the pagefile for certain things regardless of how much RAM you have, just as Photoshop does as well. I've got 1.36GB of memory left, and XP is still using 526mb of the PF. Not only that, a temp drive can be used for installs and stuff like that, which only helps...
Tas.