andrewanimation

Hello,

I'm getting whole new hard drives for my system very soon, and just wanted to stop in here and make sure the ones I have my eye on are great choices. I'm going to ask Best Buy the same thing tomorrow, but I don't know if they can/would give advice that involves comparing different brands.

I'm going to set them up in a RAID1 mirror array, as I assume that's the safest setup around, for when a hard drive dies. (I just had to pay $250 to recover the data off of my last hard drive after it crashed)

So I'm planning for two 500GB drives for the array. I seem to have found that 500GB drives give you the best value, at $120 each, because the price per GB of the bigger ones spike up too much, such as the 750GB ones being $220 each, ($100 more for only 250 more GB) which is especially expensive since I need two just for the mirror array.

I'm planning to get Seagate ones. The Barracuda 7200.10, with 7200 rpm, a 16MB buffer, SATA-300, an Average Seek (msec) of 12.6, an Average Latency (msec) of 4.16, and a Maximum External Transfer Rate of 300 Mbits/sec.

I'm not too sure what some of those measurements mean, but I'm interested in it because it's 500GB, and because it's by Seagate, which I'm trusting to be the most reliable hard drive manufacturer because they have a 5-year warranty and I don't know of any other hard drive company that offers that.

So I'm planning on two Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GBs in a RAID1 mirror array. ($120 x 2)

I'm assuming my RAID controller will handle the maximum potential of these drives, but I might have to just ask Best Buy that one, as I don't know anything about RAID controllers, including what kind I have.

Please correct me on any of this, or let me know that it's a good buy.

Thanks