Me, my cpu functionally illiterate self, is building a computer with the help of one my friends. Unfortunately, he is still away on a consulting gig with limited access to any form of communication (either work or his super-controlling gf). I’m again writing to this board for their sage wisdom and advice.
Ok, so I’ve just gotten my graphics card (Geforce 7800GT OC). To recap: I have an AMD 3700+ 939, I keep forgetting my motherboard, I think it’s an Asus 939 socket…I don’t have memory yet, but I’m thinking of getting 2 1GB sticks. I’ll get that later, as i think hard drives are more important now.
My friend, back in October (yes, this is slow going), suggested getting 2 Hitachi Deskstar 80GB SATA II (I think b/c they are cheap). He wants to RAID them. I believe that’s a good thing.
Anyway, I was at the gym, and one of my friends from high school who I haven’t seen in a long time has suggested that there is better hard drives out there. Silly question, but do I need a better hard drive? What makes it better, meaning, do I get that much better a return on performance? My thoughts are that so far my components are near top of the line, or were recently top of the line. I might as well be consistent with the rest of the build. Anyway, my high school friend at the gym suggested getting one (I forget which), but the price he quoted was near double what the SATA’s above cost.
Again, I intend to play Doom3 (man am I behind) and, I’ll think I’ll add Oblivion.
Deskstar - ex IBM. Google ‘IBM deathstar’. Maybe Hitachi have got over the issue. Me? After sticking (hehe) with IBM for 15 years (I still have a 1991 IBM 1GB SCSI HDD) and then losing a 180 GB HDD, I went for two 250 GB Samsung drives. They give me a decent balance of quietness and low temperature (they’re not the best at either, but put together is different). When you RAID them, use RAID 1 (mirroring) not RAID 0 (striping).
2 250 GB drives? What am I doing with getting 2 80 GB? (Oh yeah, I forgot, my friend intends that I get a monster storage drive, like a 250 GB). How much more peformance will I have with 2 250 GBs? I’ll look up the deathstar now.
SATA and IDE drives cost about the same; SATA costs a bit more, $10 or so. For practical purposes the read/write speeds of SATA and IDE are the same; IDE’s burst-speed limit is 133Mb/sec where SATA is 150, but most drives cannot move more than about 50Mb/sec anyway. IDE is on the way out however. SATA-2 is faster but I don’t know much about real-world-use of it.
For general hard-drives I prefer Seagate but whatever brand you buy, look for a drive that has a 5-year or 3-year warranty. Don’t get one with a 1- or 2-year warranty.
Using two (identical) drives in RAID-0 makes them work twice as fast as one drive would be–the controller sends the first-half of everything to the first drive, and the second-half to the second. The drives you use generally need to be the same size; if they aren’t (and the controller hardware allows using two different sized drives) you usually cannot use the leftover space on the larger drive at all. RAID-0 tends to have crashes a lot however, and often these are unrecoverable and require a complete OS reinstall.
…If you want a “faster” hard-drive setup, consider coughing up $180 for a 10,000-RPM drive such as a 74Gb Western Digital Raptor. They cost about the same as two smaller 80Gb drives would and they provide nearly the speed, but do not suffer from the crashing issues that RAID-0 setups tend to have and still run fairly quiet. Switching from a normal (7400 RPM) drive to a 10,000 RPM drive makes the entire computer “feel” faster–it doesn’t necessarily benchmark any faster, but it responds faster to input.
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Hard drives are largely commodity items for the home market. The brands can largely be considered the same and you just need to pick size, speed, and interface.
I don’t think SATA is worth much more than just a plain vanilla IDE drive. I would also question whether you really want a RAID setup when you admit you aren’t that knowledgable. That seems way to complicated and risky to me.
10,000 RPM hard drives are supposed to pefrom well. To be honest, I would just get a 200+ GB hard drive with either SATA or IDE or, if you really want performance, get one of the 10,000 RPM ones. The faster ones are usally smaller so you might consider getting a larger, regular hard drive to store things like music files that take up lots of space. You can also set up backups between the drives but that is a pretty simple software task.
The major benefit of SATA drives is simplicity: no jumpers, no master / slave malarkey. A secondary benefit is that the cables are smaller and impede airflow less.
RAID-0 drives don’t need to be the same size; the basic RAID software that came with my motherboard allows almost anything. I’ve got a 20 GB and a 30 GB drive RAIDed right now, and if I recollect, one of my friends has one IDE and one SATA drive of a significantly different size RAIDed. Still, I’d have to agree that RAID-0 isn’t the best for a hard drive with your OS on it; I personally only use mine as a storage device for large files I won’t need forever or for suspiscious downloads.
I’ve never known anyone except a computer geek to set up a RAID for home use. The obvious benefit of a RAID array is that if one drive goes kaput your computer keeps on chugging. But, for home use, disk drives are reasonably reliable. You are spending a lot of money on something that is fairly likely not to break before it becomes obsolete.
I personally would skip the RAID idea and spend the extra money on an external disk drive to use for backing up your important stuff.
Whatever you do, make sure that you have good air flow and cooling through your computer case. Heat is the number one killer of computer components. Everyone knows that you need a honking big CPU cooler these days, but what a lot of folks don’t realize is how much heat other things in the system like the video card and disk drives can generate.
The issue is not the expected reliability of the component but the trouble it will cause if it does fail. The OS and the apps can be reinstalled, and the data restored (you do back up your data, don’t you?), but this all takes time. If you’ve got mirrorred disks, all you have to do is swap out the failed disk, regenerate the mirror, and away you go. And a second disk is not expensive.
80G hard drives are rather on the small side nowdays. You can readily find 250G drives for $75-$100 nowdays. Why go with drives so small?
I agree with other comments that RAID is needlessly overcomplicating your system for little benefit. What’s the data that is so vital? You said you were going to use this to play games. Get an external hard drive, and set up a task to automatically backup your data to that every day. You’ll have nearly as good a backup, with less complication, and spend less in the process.
I’ve worked with various brands of hard drives, and all seemed to work about as well. I’ve only had one fail, and I was real happy with the results of that. It was a Western Digital that I had given to my nephew when I replaced it; it failed after 2+ years of use. When I inquired about the possibility of fixing it, WD replied that it was still under warranty, and they were sending me a brand new replacement (and actually a bigger one, since they didn’t make that size any more). I was quite satisfied.
There are lots of cases where a specific drive design turns out to work poorly. But all the manufacturers have this occasionally; I haven’t seen any brand be consistently worse than the others at this. You’ll hear all kinds of nasty nicknames: IBM/Hitachi Deathstar, Western Digital cRap-tor, Samsung Data Swansong, Maxstor DieMax, Seagate BitesYa Barracuda, etc. But all of those manufacturers have millions of drives working for people every day.
The first thing to do is identify the need. I am a computer tech and have tons of stuff on my PC, and have never come close to filling up a 100 Gig drive. My son has two 150 gig drives bursting at the seams with his music files. The price difference between a 80 gig drive and a 120 gig drive is usually peanuts. The bigger drives tend to be faster. Look at the drive cache, 8meg is good. Raid is a lot of smoke unless you are talking servers and are going to Raid 5. Raid on a desktop is going to be 0 or 1. Either the info is striped (shared ) on two drives, or mirrored (two drives whith the same info). The share thing is a bit faster, but you double your risk factor, if EITHER drive goes south you lose everything. Mirror has no real downside, and is more fail safe, except it costs twice as much. Given reasonable backup practices, not an issue. I would assess how much room I think I need, double it, and go from there .
I buy for a small college, and the usual size of drives coming with units is 80 Gig. I read your post and did some checking, you are quite right, there is no reason not to go with a much larger drive, the difference is chump change. The smaller units do serve our purpose, and 80 gig is more than enough for a open lab computers and even 15 dollars a unit adds up when you are buying five hundred units. I believe your advise is very good though, for the home user there is no reason to not get the larger capacity drive, and a few good reasons to do so.
I had a temp job at a very large corporation testing and RMAing dead drives - hundreds of them. Every major brand was used throughout the company. The Maxtors were, far and away, the most likely to die early deaths. That’s also been my experience with my home PC.
I tend to go with Western Digital. No manufacturer is perfect, of course, but WD seems to have given me (and that company) the least amount of trouble.
Well, I was going to RAID them on the advice of my friend who is a super-computer nerd of the highest level. This guy has a data center running out of his basement. He practices Sun clustering in his spare time. He told me that RAID1 (striping, I believe) was for increased efficiency. I’m all about efficiency, baby. However, I’ve now heard from my other friends of the raptor, and I might go with that. Is RAID that much more efficient to justify the cost (then again, isn’t the 10k rpm raptor more expensive than 2 80 gb drives?)? It’s not sounding much like it is, contrary to my friend’s views.
RAID 1 is mirrorring, not striping - that’s RAID 0 - and can give you significant advantages when reading files as, given a suitable controller, you can be reading from two parts of a file at the same time, doubling the read speed, while writing is no slower.
Most games like Doom 3 don’t constantly hit the disk while you are playing, otherwise they would run too slow. They load up all of the necessary data for the level you are on into RAM and run from there. The computer doesn’t touch the disk again until you kill all the baddies and move to the next level. A faster disk subsystem isn’t going to make much difference while you are playing. It’s only going to make the level transitions faster, and even then the difference isn’t going to be dramatic.
For games, you want to concentrate your money on the CPU, RAM, and video card. That’s where the main performance bottlenecks are.
There’s a big difference to what makes a game system more efficient vs. what makes a data center system more efficient.
I installed a second drive on my computer a few months back, and was a bit nervous as my only previous experience inside my computer’s box had been to add RAM.
The SATA drive was so simple to install that i could hardly believe i hadn’t missed some important step. But i turned the computer on and, Presto!, there it was. The whole process, including installing the software, opening the computer, adding the new drive, and then getting up and running can’t have taken more than 30 minutes, and that’s only because i went slowly to make sure i was following the instructions properly.
