Black widow spec advice please

[Shub]

Hi

So what brand water cooling systems do you guys (3XS) usually use in your builds?

[leepen@scan]

Have a look at the base specs for this system; 3XS Triad "Tian Di Hui"

3xs recommended base specification - The components choosen below are a fixed specification that cannot be changed. The 3xs team have verified these to be the best all round hardware for the intended use.

Allsorts, depends what works in what case really!

Best regards

[Shub]

Raid config advice please.

"What Raid Config? - Stripe / Mirror / Raid 5 / Raid 10 / 0+1"

I mostly use my PC for watching films and gaming, so what raid config is advised? I understand with Level 0 Stripe you can lose all data if one drive fails but it offers increased performace.

And Level 1 Mirror provides redundancy by writing all data to 2 or more drives, provides excellent data security since ALL drives has to fail before any data is lost, but does that mean for example with my 2 1TB drives I will only have 1TB of usable space?

Hard Drive Partitions? Again im cluless Just read some info on drive partitions but still unsure if I would want/need it.

If some one could tell me what they think would be best for me in mind of what im going to be using my pc for and i'll just go with that.

My Drives:

System drives 1000 GB Samsung Spinpoint F1, 7200 rpm, 32MB Cache

Storage Hard drives 1000 GB Samsung Spinpoint F1, 7200 rpm, 32MB Cache

Solid State Drives 80GB Intel X25-M SSD (Read 250MB/s Write 70MB/s)


Thanks

[PeteG@Scan]

If you find yourself having to ask mate, then don't get any!

Raid controllers can be downright random at times and if you don't have experiance with them, they can prove more trouble than they are worth.

The performance increase of Raid 0 will add a little bit of a speed to your game load times, but is pointless for films and such.

Raid 1 will keep your data safer (i.e. you won't loose your film collection if one drive dies physically) but then again the's the drivers it add's and the extra level of complexity involved means that sometimes the software can go tit's up for no real reason (well normally a windows related issue) and leave you with a migraine as you try and fix the whole configuration (which normally only happens when you can't afford the time to do it).

As such personally I wouldn't surgest raid to anyone unless they needed it so bad they had come and asked me for a fix to a problem and that would resolve it.

Partitions is personal preference. I'd set one up for windows itself on a large drive (maybe a 100 gig or so to allow for software installs) and then that way if you have a TB drive with your O.S on it then a failure of windows which may result in a reinstall won't loose you and data, as that should be saved onto the other partition on the drive and you only have to reinstall into that 100gig when the o.s. goes back on.

[Infinite]

SSD for the OS and programs.

Then maybe you can RAID1 the 2 1TB drives if your scared of dataloss/drive failure.

For partitions, make in 1 of the drives (or both if RAID1) a partition of around 200GB? for games? Then the rest for data.

[PeteG@Scan]

The O.S. needs to write data back and forth a lot. SSD's have a limited amounts of writes that you can do and whilst these have improved over the years I still wouldn't choose to put the O.S. on it personally (personal preference) for that reason.

You load time will improve but past that, I don't know how much of an improvement it'll make for day to day use. If you do put the O.S. on a SSD then make sure you place the swap file somewhere else other than on the SSD itself.

Personally I'd put your games on the SSD as they tend to be write once and read many, many times. This will speed your game load times up a lot as well so is well worth doing.

[Shub]

Thanks for the input, much obliged.