Good or Not?

P

Phippsp

New Member
Would this be considered a good Hard Drive?

WESTERN DIGITAL WD2000JD 200GB SERIAL ATA HDD 7200 RPM 8MB BUFFER BARE DRIVE WESTERN DIGITAL WD2000JD 200GB SERIAL ATA HDD 7200 RPM 8MB BUFFER BARE DRIVE
 
Well my attentions are mostly aimed at a good gaming pc thats what im tring to build. So far with Amd 3500, Asus A8V Delux, and BFG Geforce 6800 Ultra 256mb I think im off to a good start. Now I just need to get the hard drive, the cd rom and cd burner, and the memory.
 
Praetor said:
WD makes 400GB drives? Last time I checked it was just Hitatchi
Click to expand...

not just hitatchi, seagate makes them also :P but you correct in that to my knowlege WD does not make them.
 
how will a dedicated gaming computer use up 200GB??? You'd have to have a buttload of huge games...

Gaming computers don't need lots of storage, it can actually produce slower access times if you get too big of a drive. usually you get a small drive to load XP on and your most important stuff, then a larger drive JUST for storage. But w/e floats your boat...
 
Ok so your saying that i should get a smaller hard drive for xp, and game, and the basic stuff, and then I should get another hard drive for misc things such as downloading songs, saved files and pictures and stuff and the second hard drive wont effect any performance of the first hard drive?
 
Phippsp said:
Ok so your saying that i should get a smaller hard drive for xp, and game, and the basic stuff, and then I should get another hard drive for misc things such as downloading songs, saved files and pictures and stuff and the second hard drive wont effect any performance of the first hard drive?
Click to expand...

...i think thats exactly what i meant lol. Having a smaller dedicated XP drive will allow for slightly faster access/transfer/read/write times. The secondary drive won't slow down the first one UNLESS it has some kind of defect or a MAJOR difference. You want to match drives if you use 2...don't get a 5400RPM and mush it with a 10,000RPM drive. You'll want them both to run on the same transfer system speed too, like both IDE, SATA, RAID...w/e. I don't think you can do 1 IDE and one SATA.
 
Well then I believe I will find one with SATA since I heard that is the new latest technology and will match the RPMS's up. Is there anything else I should consider in this matching?

And could you possible tell me about the size you think I shall need for my first and my second. All i will be doing is have about at the most 3 games ever at one time on my computer. Mostly Everquest II and mabye another MMOPRG and then just some regular game. And will have the following parts in my computer which you see in my signiture. And will proble have AIM, Mozilla Firefox and what not on it. The second hard drive I will proble store pictures from my camera, song files, and just saved d/l's.

Is this something that will relate to RAID?
 
I'd probably do a 20GB+60GB...but i don't even use 20GB as it is so yah. If you think you will be having alot of stuff you couls do a 40GB+160GB...but thats up to you.

I believe a RAID0 is the fastest type of connection you can get, besides the SATA2 on the NF4 lol. Plain SATA should prove to be fast enough for a gaming computer though, alot of people are still using ATA100 lol.

You want basically the SAME EXACT harddrive, just one version smaller than the other. Let's use an example:

WD 40GB 7200RPM SATA 8MB-Buffer
WD 80GB 7200RPM SATA 8MB-Buffer

I wouldn't mix diff brands, RPM's architecture, or bufferspeeds, cuz then one will bottlenecjk another and you will get problems (on a RAID connection it just flat out shouldn't work unless they are identical)
 
if you using raid you using both harddrive as one so you not putting windows on the smaller one you putting windows on both of them. You can still partition it so you have one small partition for windows and one big one for storage but the data in either partition is going on both harddrives. The whole purpose of raid 0 is so both harddrive can work at the same time seeking the same file.
 
Last edited:
So what is a RAID array my friend keeps bringing up? What does it do and is it good or a bad thing?
 
Last edited:
mgoldb2 said:
if you using raid you using both harddrive as one so you not putting windows on the smaller one you putting windows on both of them. You can still partition it so you have one small partition for windows and one big one for storage but the data in either partition is going on both harddrives. The whole purpose of raid 0 is so both harddrive can work at the same time seeking the same file.
Click to expand...

ah yah, i got confused on that. That's why RAID 0 is potentially more dangerous, you have one drive fail and both are screwed. because half of your file might be on one HDD and the other part is on the other non accessible one. Running RAID 0 will still be considerably faster than a standard ATA setup or even SATA150 i believe. But for a true dedicated drive i thik a different SATA setup is needed (someone knows which it is..i don't i think it's something like RAID 2 or 3)

http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

^THAT will do a MUCCCHHH better job of explaining than i could ever do lol.
 
Phippsp said:
So what is a RAID array my friend keeps bringing up? What does it do and is it good or a bad thing?
Click to expand...

There 2 type of raid that is comman for the normle home user.

RAID 0 stripping

RAID 1 mirroring

From my experience more people use RAID 0 for there home computer then RAID 1.

With Raid 0 you dont want to use 2 different size harddrive like one person sugested. I am pretty sure if you have a 20gb and 80gb and use raid 0 you will only get 40 gb of storage because it ignores the other 60gb in the 80gb but if you use 2 identicle harddrives like 2 80GB then you will get the full 160GB.
RAID 0 is when Data is divided when it is written to both drives so that the workload is balanced and thus more efficient. The data is broken up into chunks or stripes when it is alternatingly stored.

RAID 1 is use to enhance performane on the other hand RAID 1 is for security reason. RAID 1 keeps a identicle copy of it self on the secound harddrive so if the first 1 breaks you can just switch it with the secound one and you lose nothing. the cost is you lose the abilty to store anything on the secound harddrive.

What you proberly want to consider is RAID 0
the one disadvantage of RAID 0 is if one harddrives crashes you lose ALL your data even if there nothing wrong with the secound harddrive.
 
yes RAID 0 is much faster than a single SATA drive. the 10k rpm drives dont use the full bandwidth of SATA, even ATA133 isn't fully used with a 7200rpm HDD.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top