Trying to decide on hard drives for new rig

When I left for college last year I decided that I didn't need a desktop, and that I'd manage to live with a laptop. Well, I made it a whole five months but now I've changed my mind.

• GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3R
• E6750
• 4GB G.Skill PC2-6400
• 7300 LE [to be upgraded at later date]

I'm building the system listed above later this week, and I have everything nailed down except for storage. The situation is as follows: I have about 400.00 left in my budget to spend. I currently have a 150GB Raptor which I pulled from the system I gave to my dad... What would be my best bet as far as far as storage goes. Should I sell the raptor and get four 500GB drives? Should I keep the raptor and get two 500GB drives and run them in raid 1 until I can afford two more?

Thanks.

nah, keep the raptor as your main drive and grab a 750 or 2 for storage and raid those.

Those new 7200.11 from Seagate are pretty fast. I'll get them for my next upgrade surely.

They are in benchmarks only. But not in real world apps. The benchmarks are as accurate as 3dmark...

I just bought 3 WD 750gb aaks , They are always at the top, go here http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage.html and its always in the top 10 mostly top 5, on any of the tests and it has the best performance to price ratio, newegg has them for $155 which is the cheapest 750gb drive the seagates are an extra $40 right now and really are not going to add anything performance wise and if you need performance your raptor is better then the seagates. I had bought 2 1tb samsung F1's and they maybe the fastest drives but both of mine were DOA. If they cant make it to my door ok how are they going to last for any amount of time.

Blazing fire said:

They are in benchmarks only. But not in real world apps. The benchmarks are as accurate as 3dmark...

Click to expand...

Depends on the benchmark -- there are benchmarks out there for, example, booting Windows and game loading times. Those are pretty "real world" in my opinion, and in many cases like these, the Raptors lose to the perpindicular-recording 7200RPM drives.

I've been looking at the Spinpoint F1 1TB drives myself, but it seems like they are VERY fragile. There are quite a number of dead drive reports from various sources on the web. So I too have been indecisive on what drive(s) to pair with my new rig.

Can't go wrong with seagate's warranty. Those 750's sound like a good choice to me. 500's would be better if you're worried about price because they have a better size/price ratio.

WD 750gb AAKS = $155/750gb = .206 cents a gb
WD 500gb AAKS = $100/500gb = .20 cents a gb (but the 750gb should be faster because it has another disk)
Seagate 500gb 7200.11 = $120/500gb = .24 cents a gb
Seagate 750gb 7200.11 = $195/750gb = .26 cents a gb

The 750gb drives will have very similar performance both better then the 500gb drives, the 750gb are both very good, the WD wins because of the price point, it cant be beat.

I have a 500AAKS, and just ordered 3x750gbAAKS should have them in a few days, I will compare them

Wow, those WD 750GB's seems like a steal. I just can't decide if want to trun two of them in a raid 1 array, or if I want to use one internal and one in an external enclosure.

Second option is more reliable, but certainly not as cool

I actually bought one of the Sammy SpinPoint F1 750Gb drives rather than the WD. Price/size is identical and so are the number of platters. So it came down to preference...