Help - Hard Drive Configuration

[PCnewbie007]

I'm building a gaming PC for my son and I also want to do video editing and want to have the best configuration of the hard drives. I have the following system:

AMD Phenom II X4 955 3.2 BE
Gigabyte GA-MA790X-UD4P Mobo
4GB of 1066 RAM
GTX 260 Card

I have purchased the following hard drives:

2 WD Raptor 74GB 10000RPM with 16MB cache
2 WD Caviar Black 500GB 7200RPM with 32MB cache
2 Hitachi Deskstar 500GB 7200RPM with 16MB cache

I originally was going to go RAID 0 with the Caviars or Deskstars but I read an article on anandtech that said I would not get any real performance boost from RAID 0.

Can I RAID 0 the Raptors as drive C for OP system and games and then put a Caviar as a nonRaid drive D for my video? Should I just go with a nonRaid config of the Raptor for the OP system and games and a Caviar for video? Should I go Raid 0+1 with the Caviars and Deskstars (or do they have to be the same brand and profile)?

I also have a 500GB external hard drive for nightly back-up.

Thanks for your input!

 

[LokutusofBorg]

Mucking with RAID has always been over-the-top for me, so I've never done it and never really wished I had it. I've watched friends lose their system when their RAID went down and their only option was to re-image/re-install. Kills a LAN party pretty fast.

An ideal setup for a gaming computer is a system drive and your games on a separate drive. An ideal setup for a video render box would be a system drive, a source material drive, and a render destination drive. You have enough hard drives to mix and match all you want, or experiment with RAID to find the best config for what you want to do with the box.

Using a Raptor is quasi-equivalent to using RAID 0 with standard drives. Using Raptors in RAID 0 will go even further.

RAID 0 for the system drive will help you boot fast, and provide marginal improvement for pagefile operations.
RAID 0 for the game install drive will help game performance any time the game needs to read lots of data from the disk (loading levels, zoning, etc.).
RAID 0 for the render destination drive will help you render videos faster, but rendering is so CPU dependent that I'm not sure your Ph2 will bottleneck a single Raptor or even a single Black.