System hard drive vs Storage Hard drive

[Psionic Wibbly]

I am planning to buy a Scan 3xs system soon. i was looking at all the configurations and was intrigued as to the advantages of having a separate set of system and storage Hard Drives. (I was planning to have at least 1TB of storage and felt that 2 x 500GB HDD in raid 0 would be what i wanted.)

I wonder if someone from scan PC can enlighten me about this as Scan seems to be the only system builder that seems to be doing this (Mesh and OcUK dont have seprate system and storage HD in their basic config.)

[Lee H]

The benefits of having 2 seperate drives is paramount nowadays. Most people use the "storage" drive for stuff like mp3 files, photo files, and various other media files or files downloaded such as alternative browsers, music players and various programs.

The benefit of this is if the windows drive crashes, corrupts etc - the media files on the other drive(s) will still be safe and accessable when you reinstall the operating system so everything is not lost.

The benefits for setting up a raid array and the differences between the various RAID options can be found at the following link Here

Best Regards,

[mondogenerator]

Personally I'd not go with 2X500gb drives in RAID 0, it will offer you no data protection (you'll have 1T but if you loose one drive you loose everything on both), it will offer you less!

In my opinion it would be better to get two smaller SATAII drives and put them in RAID0 (for the performance which is substantial, especially with SATAII) and then get 1 or 2 larger drives for backup/data storage. If your RAID0 array fails then your data is still on the other drives.

The ideal setup is to have a seperate server box with two or more very large drives in RAID 1 (mirroring) minimum. That will mean your data is more secure.