Hard Drive shopping woes

[Raggy]

Price to performance what’s the best way to go as far as hard drives are concerned? Would it be worth it to get one faster but much smaller hard drive such as a 36.7gig Raptor or should some opt. to run a pair of larger SATA hard drives (say a 40gig and a 60gig?). I’m planning on building my first gaming rig in the next few months and the only thing I haven’t really found a wealth of information on if hard drives. What effect on the overall system would it have? Would biting the bullet and going for a raptor very small Raptor and a SATA secondary drive or maybe one 74gig Raptor be worth it? Or maybe something totally different altogether? Thank you very much for any help.

[0iD]

36gig raptors aren't all that speedy, whereas their bigger brothers, the 76's are the mutt's nuts. So go for 2 good quality sata drives or one 76 raptor. Buzz along to Storage Review for specs & opinions.

[Apex]

Samsung/Seagate

[Raggy]

Thanks for the link, I'll read up.

[Fresco]

Raptors are considered the fastest drives for the general user, particularly gamers, but they suffer from a comparitively small size and high cost per Gb. Depends if an increase in hard disk performance of 5-10% is important to you.

It also depends what you want to use the drive for. Personally for what I use my PC for, I think that 76Gb is plenty of space, but if your into downloading lots of music and films this can soon be used up.

Many power users have a single Raptor for the OS and applications, and a second larger, slower hard drive for multimedia storage. But this is of course more expensive.

Then there are those that have two Raptors in Raid0 configuration - but thats silly money, and I have even heard reports of this being slower than a single raptor drive.

[Raggy]

It also depends what you want to use the drive for. Personally for what I use my PC for, I think that 76Gb is plenty of space, but if your into downloading lots of music and films this can soon be used up.

Well I've used 56k and a 36.7gig IDE HDD for years now, so the switch probably wouldn't be two much if the performance of a 36gig raptor is worth it (something I'm reading into now) and then adding a SATA drive later for storage of none priority info.