hard drive tempter...

[rainbow]

i have been offerd two 36 gig raptors for 75 quid they are fine and have been tested should i go for it as im currently doing a performance upgrade on my pc??

[Splash]

£75 for the pair? I would - I have 5 in a RAID 5 array and you should see my machine boot...

[rainbow]

lol is it a joke speed? is it easy to set up raid? and what raid shoud i use?

[Splash]

Well, if WoW bombs out on me and hangs my machine (which it used to do frequently prior to rebuilding) I can reboot and be logged back into WoW before my session had timed out. And my machine's hardly pushing the boundaries of bleeding edge tech (still 32 bit cpu!)

As for RAID you have 2 options really if using 2 drives - if you want the speed then you need to be looking at RAID 0 where the data is written across both disks. Only do this if you keep regular backups, as if you lose one drive you lose all the data. For redundancy (not really something you'd need on a home PC you can use RAID1 or mirroring - data written to 1 drive is automatically written to the other - lose one disk and keep on trucking. If you're going to do this you're probably going to struggle justifying the Raptors.

As for setup it's usually a case of using the RAID setup during bootup - what mobo do you have?


Oooh - one last thing - Raptors aren't the quietest of drives - not one for your silent HTPC!

[rainbow]

asus an8-sli bothered i know noise is a by product of power tbh

[rainbow]

what so to set the raid up its all done in the bios??

[this_is_gav]

Yeah. In the BIOS, you enable which SATA channels you want set for RAID, then when you save the changes, you get a section come up after the BIOS to let you configure your array.

Before you even go down that path, make sure you've got a floppy disk with the drivers on, as you'll need to use the F6 mode in the Windows installation to let it see the array you're installing on.

Have a look around for some basic guides - it's all easy to do even for a novice if you're well prepared and have done the research.

As for the price, I wouldn't go as far as shouting bargain, but they do have a 5-year warranty, so even if they go pair-shaped, it's still all good. A good saving from buying new.

Only recommendation I'd have is to have a RAID0 array as your boot drive, with most or all of your programs/games installed on it, then have a data drive, so when you ever do a reinstall, all you need to do is copy my documents, and things across.