Spec me a couple of hard drives

[yan816]

I want to buy a couple of hard drives to run in raid 0. I only need them for my operating system as I have other drives for storage. Whats the best to get at the moment, I want something quite and fast. Thanks

[Zak33]

Current concencus on HEXUS forums is as follows I think:

Samsung make the most reliable, and while fractionally slower than WD and Seagate drives, they are very quiet.

Western Digital make a large range which is quite confusing, but the best seem to be the Desktop SE16 range.

Seagates are either loved or hated...in equal measure. You either hate them and think they stink for reliability ......or you've never ever had a problem and use them a lot

And Maxtor seem to have dropped off the reliability scales for far too many people.

I think 320 gig WD drives offer good value, good speed, and I'd suggest 2 of these
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=561030

which are the latest incarnation with 16mb cache's.

I shall not get involved with any RAID is good/RAID is bad advice, as you gotta try it yaself

[redlight]

Couple of these Sammy 400GB
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=451989
Quiet and reliable

[dancingmatt]

Take advantage of the days and days of reviewing and searching I did, and buy Samsung HD401LJs or HD501LJs. Think you can get the 500GB 501LJs for £63 each.

Brilliant, quick, dead quiet. And they just won a magazine's hard drive roundup, PCPro or Comp Shopper, can't remember which.

Just buy them. The alternative I was strongly considering prior to these was the WD 500GB WD5000AAKS series.

DM

[staffsMike]

I can strongly recommend the WD 500gb WD000AAKS or 400gb variant which I have just bought. They are super quiet and quick.

The samsungs have very strong reviews though I don't think you will go wrong with either.

[yan816]

Thanks for the replies , I got two Western Digital WD2500KS 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB Cache Hard Drives on the way. I hope this was the right choice as I paid £40 each for them.

I already have a couple of older drives for storage. I was tempted to get a couple of 74Gb Raptors, but bottled at the price when I saw the cost.

If I put the 2 drives in RAID 0, can I still put a partition on them, and will this effect performance or speed? Thanks.

[amjedm]

Thanks for the replies , I got two Western Digital WD2500KS 250GB 7200RPM SATAII/300 16MB Cache Hard Drives on the way. I hope this was the right choice as I paid £40 each for them.

I already have a couple of older drives for storage. I was tempted to get a couple of 74Gb Raptors, but bottled at the price when I saw the cost.

If I put the 2 drives in RAID 0, can I still put a partition on them, and will this effect performance or speed? Thanks.

Good choice IMO with the WD drives you've ordered. Raptors would have been noisy compared to the quieter KS drives.

I haven't setup raid recently but going back a few years when I used to look after a server - it was possible to have raid and partition.

[dbh]

Samsungs can achieve some of the highest bandwidth and in some cases outpace a raptops (when in RAID) so they are a good choice