New SATA III as boot or storage/game drive?

what do you think would be more beneficial?

i'm going to buy computer parts i dont really need but i figure i would buy something i am going to need too, since rage is comming out soon and i only have about 80gigs of free space left on my 320 SATA II drive.

so yea make it a boot drive or a storage drive, no page file/VM or what ever else people call it on the drives.

specs are in sig, although a little close to 4.0Ghz and will be 16gigs of ram instead of 8gigs (the parts i dont need but hey its cheap now).

i do know in general that loading from one drive to the other will be faster than copying or running off of the one although not much considering no virtual memory

SATAII and SATA III make no difference in hard drives. They're not fast enough to take advantage of SATA III. Only SSD's will notice a real difference.

+1 with regard to Knufire's comment. The difference between Sata I, II and III is only in regard to a very, very short-lived burst rate transfer. As soon as the drive cache has shot its wad its all over. The only parameter that makes any noticeable difference in hard disk performance is increasing the spindle rpm, say from 5400 to 7200 or from 7200 to 10,000.

another thought, raid?

a pair of recertified drives would cost less than regular. just thinking to get more umpf out of this thing
severe testing before i would raid and i would be backing it up on a regular basis (bunch of left over 120gig drives)

mechanical hard drives are CHEAPCHEAPCHEAP right now, why risk a refurb?

brand new Seagate 1 TB SATA III drive: $49.99 on the 'egg right now
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148697

I know, no real difference, but its $5 cheaper than the SATA II drive.

Throw in an inexpensive SSD, after rebate its $1/GB!:
OCZ Vertex Plus 60 GB, $68.99 w/ $10 MIR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227738
not the fastest, but still much faster than any mechanical drive.

Use the 60 GB as a boot drive and the 1 TB as your data drive. Perhaps keep the 320, or make it a portable drive.

ScrewySqrl said:

mechanical hard drives are CHEAPCHEAPCHEAP right now, why risk a refurb?

brand new Seagate 1 TB SATA III drive: $49.99 on the 'egg right now
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148697

I know, no real difference, but its $5 cheaper than the SATA II drive.

Throw in an inexpensive SSD, after rebate its $1/GB!:
OCZ Vertex Plus 60 GB, $68.99 w/ $10 MIR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227738
not the fastest, but still much faster than any mechanical drive.

Use the 60 GB as a boot drive and the 1 TB as your data drive. Perhaps keep the 320, or make it a portable drive.

Click to expand...

This is good advice. Mechanical drives for storage, SSD for boot and/or cache drives.