Hard drive advice.

[socalcaz]

I am thinking of buying a faster hard drive, you can see what I have below. I was thinking of buying the 74gb Raptor for operating system and games and using a 250gb drive, similar to the one below, for apps and data. What do you think. Any suggestions much appreciated.

[Heavy552 AWG]

Re: Hard drive advice.

I use a Maxtor myself for the System and backup drive same as you do.

But I have a bunch of Maxtor SATA's running as a RAID 0 for gaming.

I think that Maxtor was purchased by Seagate last year so Im not sure what is availible.

To sum up, consider a SATA Raid 0 Array for gaming.

[socalcaz]

Re: Hard drive advice.

I use a Maxtor myself for the System and backup drive same as you do.

But I have a bunch of Maxtor SATA's running as a RAID 0 for gaming.

I think that Maxtor was purchased by Seagate last year so Im not sure what is availible.

To sum up, consider a SATA Raid 0 Array for gaming.

Is it difficult to set up a Raid and is it that much faster than just a single drive? How is it done? Do you need two identical drives?

[Heavy552 AWG]

Re: Hard drive advice.

Having RAID 0 means to have at least two identical drives working together. 3 or more is much better. I only run games on it because if anything happens to the drives or the data, it cannot be recovered the way I run it.

My RAID Controller takes care of the drives at boot up. ASUS makes it easy for me as it is onboard my motherboard already. (P4P800-E Deluxe)

I run two Maxtor SATA 80 gigs together. While this is not 3 or more drives; it is sufficient for my gaming.

I will not make any claim if the RAID is faster than a single drive, logic dictates that several drives working the same information together sharing the load must be faster than one single drive.

I do know that with the single 7200 Maxtor I loaded into the map near last behind everyone else. With the RAID Im like first 3 on and moving when a BF2 map starts. The great equalizer is the "Verifying" data that is imposed every map.

I hope to eventually deploy 3 Raptor 150's SATAs in my next RAID, as it is like almost 1000 dollars retail just for the drives it will take some time to save the pennies.

I also do some video editing and it comes off my Camcorder's digital tape via firewire into the RAID and appears fast enough to adequately process the imagery. Taking a 1 hour 15 gigabyte movie file and crunching it down to around 700 Mb for one CD Rom takes a couple of hours on my machine.

My rig is not super "LEET" as others have faster and stronger hardware than I do but it is more than adequate for online gaming these last 16 months or so with only one rebuild of the RAID and regular maintaince on the XP.

[<DV8>mrbucket]

Re: Hard drive advice.

One thing you didn't mention was the use of a 16mb cache on drives, they are , because of the transfer rate, as fast as the raptor, but only in the transfer rate, not the seek time.

[knghtwhosaysni]

Re: Hard drive advice.

I used to have mine in RAID, and now that I don't, I can't say that I can tell the difference. I'm still one of the first people to load the map.
As for getting a new hard drive... meh , in your case I think it would be a waste as our current one is pretty good. Defrag your harddrive and play a couple games and see how fast you load a new map compared to the rest of the room.
Don't get a raptor... its also a waste of money. Might make the difference between loading the map third and loading the map first in a 64-man room, but is that really worth hundreds of dollars?

[Sir. MatDef]

Re: Hard drive advice.

There is no reason to use raid for gaming machines, all it does is double the cost for hd's and increase the chance that a drive could fail and fubar all your data. Raid 0=waste of money.

[imported_Wreck]

Re: Hard drive advice.

The best setup for cost effectiveness is a windows drive and a drive for storage. Just set it up like that. I have a 74Gb raptor and WD 320Gb 16mb Sata 3.0. I'm always the first loaded and spawned in a map. My other PC has a WD 250Gb 16mb Sata 3.0 with a 60mb windows partition and 180Gb storage partition. I have to say all three hard drives are extremely fast.

For a main PC I'd recommend two seperate drives and not one drive partitioned. That way you can do a clean windows install and not loose important data even if the windows drive crashes.

[Sir. Shpox]

Re: Hard drive advice.

There is no reason to use raid for gaming machines, all it does is double the cost for hd's and increase the chance that a drive could fail and fubar all your data. Raid 0=waste of money.

I second this, If your willing to have the chance of losing sums of data and have a large sum of money, by all means, Go for Raid.

[socalcaz]

Re: Hard drive advice.

Thanks for the advice guys!!