Best option? I'm looking for a highspeed windows drive

Speciale · Jun 22, 2005

I had a 120gig WD 8mb cache drive that i split into two parititons, one for installs and one for windows.

I then i have the same drive in the 250gig fashion for storage of photos and what have you.

Today, while building my new rig...i dropped the 120gig :bang head

Well, as i expected the drop killed it. Lucky for me i had an old 60gig maxtor that i could use. I couldnt install windows on the faster 250gig drive because i would have lost important things.

So i got my new athlon 64 running, and the thing is blazingly fast as i expected, but i can already see a very annoying bottleneck, and it is the old maxtor H/D.

So i'm thinking of replacing it with one of those high speed IDE drives, but i've been out of hte loop for so long, nearly 2 1/2 years at least, that i have no idea what would make me happy here.

Any suggestions?

I dont want to spend much more then 180-ish

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

Personally I would get another drive identical to the 250 you have and run it RAID. You'll hear arguments that reliabilty is iffy, but I have been running RAID for as long as I can remember and I havent had one single problem. Partition the OS portion into a 30 and use the rest for storage, and a lot of it at that.

Bad ConNecTioN · Jun 22, 2005

Easy, Western Digital Raptor. The 74 GB version is around your price point. It is a SATA drive however, but I am sure your new board has Serial ATA support.

Another option would be a Maxtor 16mb cache drive.

Speciale · Jun 22, 2005

edwardaune said:
Personally I would get another drive identical to the 250 you have and run it RAID. You'll hear arguments that reliabilty is iffy, but I have been running RAID for as long as I can remember and I havent had one single problem. Partition the OS portion into a 30 and use the rest for storage, and a lot of it at that.

I have three jobs in which i take digital photographs, aside from my own personal collection. I keep the most of important photos on CD, but i will shoot 2-4 gigs of photographs a week...RAID scares the poop outta me.

I'd like to play aorund with it, but i dont think it's something i'm going to do until i have another H/D to back mys tuff up to.

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

Understandable, I guess *knock on hdd* Ive never had any problems, or for that matter ever had a hdd fail. Probably just jinxed myself and the hole thing is going to go up in blue smoke. As far as back up, could you use that smaller hdd you have to back up on, cuz I tell ya running RAID seriously sped up my little monster and I can picture going back to a single drive again. Unless it was a 10K but I would have to buy two of them and run RAID

jjv687 · Jun 22, 2005

Just get a Raptor, a 36 GB isnt as fast as the 74, but it's still much faster than a standard drive and wont take such a big chunk out of your savings. Or do RAID 0 and get a DVD burner to back everything up. I wouldnt lose hardly anything if my drive died right now, just takes a little while to get the data off my old 4x DVDs. Or get 3 drives and put them in RAID 5. You'll get the speed of RAID 0 and the reliablity of RAID 1.

tom10167 · Jun 22, 2005

Speciale said:
I have three jobs in which i take digital photographs, aside from my own personal collection. I keep the most of important photos on CD, but i will shoot 2-4 gigs of photographs a week...RAID scares the poop outta me.

I'd like to play aorund with it, but i dont think it's something i'm going to do until i have another H/D to back mys tuff up to.

Run 2x400(or whatever, 250 if you already have one) in RAID 1(mirror) and get a 36GB Raptor for your operating system. You'll have ~290GB of storage.

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

Run 2x400(or whatever, 250 if you already have one) in RAID 1(mirror) and get a 36GB Raptor for your operating system. You'll have ~290GB of storage.

I have to ask, what good what that do as far as performance unless you were transferring file to another pc running RAID? Your OS is still on a slower, by comparison, on the other single hdd.

Speciale · Jun 22, 2005

When i stopped paying attention the raptor had just come out, it looks like no one else has yet to step up to the plate. I'll prolly order the 76gig later this month.

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

What RPM is the Raptor, Im running Seagates 7200? Im assuming that they're 7200 also.

laynlow · Jun 22, 2005

I run a 74gig raptor for os and apps and a 250 gig caviar for storage. I am very happy with my setup.

ETA the Raptor's are 10,000 rpm

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

Thanks, I wasnt sure.

ropey · Jun 22, 2005

Maxtor's 3 year warrantied Maxline III with 16MB cache meets the performance level of the Raptor.

I have two of them and am very impressed and that is not the easiest thing to do. A 7,200rpm drive with the performance of the 10,000rpm drive. These drives have an NCQ enabled controller so if you are a multi-tasker you will immediately find a major performance increase. Intel has partnered with Maxtor to optimize their chipset to NCQ and there is not the performance penalty from command queing that both the Raptor WD740G and Barracuda do (probably do to the large 16MB cache.

R

Maxtor 200GB ATA-133 w/ 16MB cache
Maxtor 250GB ATA-133 w/ 16MB cache
Maxtor 300GB ATA-133 w/ 16MB cache
Maxtor 200GB S-ATA w/ 16MB cache
Maxtor 250GB S-ATA w/ 16MB cache
Maxtor 300GB S-ATA w/ 16MB cache

tom10167 · Jun 22, 2005

edwardaune said:
I have to ask, what good what that do as far as performance unless you were transferring file to another pc running RAID? Your OS is still on a slower, by comparison, on the other single hdd.

Huh? Raptors are uber fast, the fastest drive you can realistically own.

Operating system on that, and one billion high-res photos constantly backed up on the other drives.

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

Hence the reason for my last question, sorry too lazy to look up stats. Does that necesarrily make them faster than a pair of 72K on RAID?

tom10167 · Jun 22, 2005

So that can of worms is looking pretty big.

edwardaune · Jun 22, 2005

Explain, or you mean that due to the posssible ineffectivness, or undependabilitly of RAID than a 10K drive is better than a "can of worms"(RAID).

jjv687 · Jun 22, 2005

Heh, yes there's already enough threads on 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 vs raptors...

Can of Worms, meaning that youre opening up another big argument about the 2 options

larva · Jun 23, 2005

ropey said:
Intel has partnered with Maxtor to optimize their chipset to NCQ and there is not the performance penalty from command queing that both the Raptor WD740G and Barracuda do (probably do to the large 16MB cache.

The Raptor 74 does not support NCQ, but rather TCQ. The "N' in NCQ stands for "native", and the Raptor is not a native SATA device. That being said, it is still so much faster mechanically than any 7200rpm drive that the native SATA interface of the Maxtor cannot overcome this factor. It's a really good 7200rpm drive, but it's not a Raptor.

jjv687 · Jun 23, 2005

larva said:
The Raptor 74 does not support NCQ, but rather TCQ. The "N' in NCQ stands for "native", and the Raptor is not a native SATA device. That being said, it is still so much faster mechanically than any 7200rpm drive that the native SATA interface of the Maxtor cannot overcome this factor. It's a really good 7200rpm drive, but it's not a Raptor.

larva, what do you mean its not a native SATA device? Whats the "T" stand for?

Best option? I'm looking for a highspeed windows drive

Disabled

Member

Member

Disabled

Member

Member

Member

Member

Disabled

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Member

Inactive Moderator

Member

Similar threads