Need to order a new hard drive asap =/

[Seggybop]

My main hard drive (a ~4 year old Samsung) has been slowly dying for many months. Somehow I've tolerated this for a while because there were more immediate things to deal with. However, at this point it's no longer acceptable if this computer randomly goes down.

So, the time of buying the new drive(s) is now. I've got around $150 max I can use for this purpose.

Unfortunately I don't know nearly enough about current storage options to easily decide what to get. My usage seems well-suited to SSDs (constant multi-tasking) but with software like Photoshop and Premiere that sometimes swap exceedingly huge amounts of data to the disk temporarily I'm not sure if I'd be ok. So maybe RAID0 with some larger conventional drives would be more worthwhile?

Apart from temporary data like that, I don't need much space. OS and commonly used programs would fit within 30GB. Large media files and such all get saved on NAS.

thanks for any help. hopefully I can order something tonight!

 

[Sahakiel]

$150 is not a lot to work with, especially if you want a capable SSD thrown in for good measure.
First, I would figure out what your disk usage is like. How much and how often are the key points. You know your applications use about 30 gigs. You didn't mention how much scratch space you use and you didn't mention the size of your data sets. You should also take note of processor speed/type and memory speed/type/size.
Depending on the rest of your computer and what files you work with, you could get away with a single 250-320GB sata drive for everything on the low end or end up seeing significant improvement with a 4 disk 8tb raid0 array. Again, it depends on how much data you're using and how fast you need that data.

 

[alyarb]

three of these would be fast (faster than an SSD) if you have enough SATA connectivity to do tri-channel RAID 0.

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