HDD For O.S

[Cornholio]

Guys, just upgraded the system, and ive reinstalled vista 64 ultimate on my 500gb sammy (my 1tb is the data drive).

Now..i was going to buy another 1tb drive and install the OS on that instead, but it seems pointless as all my data will never be stored on the OS drive, much easier to keep it on different drives.

So my question is, instead of buying another 1tb hdd, what drive for around £70 would give better performance than my 500gb sammy i have in at the moment.

cheers in advance.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

This Samsung is meant to be a single platter drive:

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/320-G...MB-Cache-89-ms

Some performance benchmarks:

http://forums.aria.co.uk/showthread.php?t=6229

http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/....php?p=4005057

Supposedly Samsung is releasing an F3 series with 500gb platters:

http://www.silentpcreview.com/forums...ic.php?t=54770

[Cornholio]

Ok what about around the £100 mark ?

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/64GB-...-s-128MB-Cache

Purhapse ?

[Cornholio]

Or...

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/150-G...-rpm-42-ms-NCQ

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

My views:
1.)I don't know whether I would trust a "cheap" SSD
3.)The Raptor is expensive for a 150gb hard drive IMHO

If you looked at the Samsung I linked too it does seem quite good for the money and you can save the extra dosh towards a decent SSD in the future.

[mac124]

For £70 i'd get a couple of the drives cat linked to and raid them. Faster than any single drive this side of an ssd.

[Cornholio]

My views:
1.)I don't know whether I would trust a "cheap" SSD
3.)The Raptor is expensive for a 150gb hard drive IMHO

If you looked at the Samsung I linked too it does seem quite good for the money and you can save the extra dosh towards a decent SSD in the future.

Whats so good about it cat ? I mean..on the face of it, just looks like a standard 320gb sata ?

[watercooled]

I don't know what the big thing is with recommending RAID 0 for an OS drive - writes may be faster but reads are often slower and access time if also often poor. Since an OS drive reads more then writes I wouldn't bother with it - get a fast single drive. A decent 7200rpm high platter density drive would be good. And something I often recommend: http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...on-theory.html

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Whats so good about it cat ? I mean..on the face of it, just looks like a standard 320gb sata ?

It is single platter which is important as more platters will mean a slower drive generally and from what I have read it is faster than a 74gb Raptor.

Looking att his review the Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 seems to be comparable to a WD VelociRaptor although I am generally not a fan of Seagate hard drives for reliability purposes:

http://www.hardwaresecrets.com/article/603/1

[DataMatrix]

Get a RAID array and make partitions.

[watercooled]

Get a RAID array and make partitions.

No really, don't.

[DataMatrix]

No really, don't.

Why not, works perfectly for me.

[watercooled]

It's been discussed plenty on the forums - and benchmarked on plenty of sites. As I posted earlier: http://forums.hexus.net/1750922-post8.html its read performance is often slower than a single drive. Yes, of course it works but it's pointless unless it's in something like a data recording system.

[aidanjt]

I don't know what the big thing is with recommending RAID 0 for an OS drive - writes may be faster but reads are often slower and access time if also often poor. Since an OS drive reads more then writes I wouldn't bother with it - get a fast single drive. A decent 7200rpm high platter density drive would be good. And something I often recommend: http://forums.hexus.net/hexus-hardwa...on-theory.html

Where did you get that load of tosh from?.. RAID0 read performance scales along with writes.

[watercooled]

Experience, benchmarks (I don't mean sequential read benchmarks like HDTune - I mean real-world usage benchmarks), online tests...
Unless you plan to shell out shed-loads of cash on a high-performance controller, RAID 0 is fast at writing data but often slower at reading or when it is faster the difference is mostly minimal. Also, and possibly more importantly, while it is great for transferring large files it's not so great when it comes to smaller reads like most system/game access. If you have tried it and found it to be faster in real-world usage that's great and I'll accept what I said isn't always true but my point is RAID0 really isn't the king for desktop storage, and was never designed to be.

One example of real-world experiences with RAID0: http://forums.hexus.net/1334644-post14.html

[sadbuttrue]

I'd go with the 320gb Samsung F1 mentioned by CAT. Based on the HDTach results it appears to hold 100mb/s upto 160GB. Personally I'd partition the drive in 2, with the first 160gb used for the O/S and games. You can put the savings towards a reasonably priced SSD around xmas. I suspect Windows 7 will help push prices down.