HD...........what is best.

[hse180]

I am going to upgrade my HD, but i am wondering as what is best.
I am thinking 1 500gb samsung spinpoint or
2 x 250gb samsung spinpoint in Raid 0.
I have never done a raid system before, but i know it is faster. Any thoughts and on this is appreciated.

[Stringent]

If you are going to stripe I would recommend 3 hard drives. It stripes with a parity bit, so if hard drive one goes, you can recover far easier. If you want to go mad, then 5 is best!

[staffsMike]

I would get a 500GB Western Digital AAKS. Self confessed WD fan boi but with good reason.. they have never let me down.

The raid option is going to be more expensive, more dangerous (one drive goes you lose everything anyway) and you will get little visible benefit for day to day operations, unless you are doing something seriously hard drive intesive, gaming certainly isn't a good enough excuse imo.

[peterb]

RAID 0 only gives you a noticeable or worthwhile improvement for sustained transferes - typically database access applications. If it 500 Gbytes of storage you want - go for the single drive. If you want sustained uptimes with a degree of fault tolerance go for RAID 1 - but don't regard it as a backup substitute. TBH, unless you are running a server system where reliability and resiliance are paramount, it isn't worth it.

[hse180]

I always wondered if Raid was worth it,all i know is that it is faster, not sure how much though. I would only be using it for gaming and storing so i would not have any performance gain, but just seemed like a good idea
So a single 500gb it will be


StaffsMike..................I have looked at your recomendation and it looks very good and also cheaper than the Spinpoint........just maybe the one i will get

[Lourdes]

Go with a single Samsung F1 (current available in 750GB and 1TB but there will be other sizes soon), best performing SATA drive - only beaten by the Raptor on access times and I/O performance (not really relevant to the desktop).

[staffsMike]

Also stupidly expensive.. stick with 500GB for best bangs for bucks.

[Lourdes]

A 750GB F1 is <15&#37; more per/GB than a HD501LJ. That isn't stupidly expensive... I have over 40 HD501LJ's but in future I'll be buying F1's, the small premium is worth it for having a larger and faster drive.

[staffsMike]

you see it that way.. I see it as almost twice as much as a decent 500GB drive.

Therefore you could infact, buy two 500GB drives for the price of one 750GB drive.

The gains in speed wouldn't warrant the loss of 250GB (if you did buy two 500GB drives) of space for me.

[EtheAv8r]

I can thoroughly recommend the Samsung Spinpoint T166 HD501LJ 500GB SATA drives.

[2Cold Scorpio]

I'm currently running two 250GB Seagate Baracuda 7200.10 drives in RAID 0 config and i'm happy. Although if you wanted to skip RAID, I'd suggest the 500GB Baracuda 7200.11 for slightly cheaper than my two 250 GB drives.