Help me choose a drive subsystem

imported_jedon

Junior Member
May 11, 2005
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I'm upgrading from an Athlon 2500+/1GB/200GB WD 8MB/7200rpm to an Athlon 64 3200, 1GB, 6600GT etc but am unsure of what the optimum drive configuration for me would be. I have some older SCSI stuff sitting around: AMI MegaRAID Enterprise 1200 8MB, (7) 9GB Barracudas and an Adaptec 19160 pci card.
Is the older SCSI stuff even comparable anymore?
I was thinking a Raptor to boot and a couple of 200GB SATA drives for page and storage?
Sorry I forgot to mention what I use it for.
1. Work: Visual Studio .NET, SQL Server, IIS
2. Download: I'm usually constantly downloading at 500KB/s, + PAR2 verify and UnRAR
3. Play: Games, mostly HL/Day of Defeat etc.
4. Video: Play HDTV streams to DLP

So if I get an NForce 4 Ultra MB like the MSI that has SATAII I might as well get a couple Hitachi 160GB SATAII drives so I get Native Command Queueing, and get a 74 GB Raptor to boot off of and hold some apps. I then put my page file split between the two 160GB drives right?

downloading and extracting archives is a lot of writing considering they tend to be in the 4-12GB range.

I've noticed that when my computer is "busy" ie pretty unresponsive, the CPU is not 100%, more like 40% and I still have 400MB left of memory so I'm assuming that it's my drive config that's hurting me, unless it's the built in networking on my MSI NForce3 mobo.

Thanx!
-Jedon
 

tiap

Senior member
Mar 22, 2001
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If you got it use it. Scsi 160 is still pretty fast. Don't forget they lessen the cpu load too. You can allways use both.