Time to buy a new hard drive

kennebell347

kennebell347

Member
I'm looking to get two new drives to run in RAID 0. I do not know much about it other than what I have read.

My system is in my signature but I will have a 5870 arriving in the mail in the next few days. I'm looking for the fastest possible loading times for games. Not worried much about windows loading faster as I am buying a smaller SSD for windows only.


What drives do you guys suggest that are fast drives that don't cost an arm and a leg? I do not want raptors or SSD's. Would two WD Caviar Black drives in RAID 0 run fast? Or is there another combo of drives that would speed up my loading times?
 
I have 2 - 500gb WD Caviar Black drive in raid 0 right now. It's been 10 months since the install and its time for a fresh one. But at the time of the fresh install it was pretty good. The only problem I had was I had to RMA one drive because it was faulty. If you don't want SSD's then the black caviar would be the next best choice.
 
Samsung's F3 and Seagate's 7200.12 have very similar figures, I would choose the Seagate just because it's been on the market since longer.

Another contender would be Hitachi's 7k1000b. Lower throughput but more agile arm.
 
Last edited:
Wow that is a good deal on those F3s! Is my thinking right? Will installing my games and programs on two Raid 0 drives make my loading times go down and so on?
 
Raid 0 will help with load times and all that but if one of your drives fails there goes your entire windows installation :o

You could always get 2 drives for RAID and use an external or another internal drive as a backup/clone drive.
 
I'm buying a third drive and its going to be a SSD drive. It will be for windows and commonly used lite programs. The two hard drives in RAID 0 will be used only for games and media.
 
kennebell347 said:
I'm buying a third drive and its going to be a SSD drive. It will be for windows and commonly used lite programs. The two hard drives in RAID 0 will be used only for games and media.
Click to expand...

I would see if you can find a good price on something to make a backup with, incase something fails, so you don't lose everything.
 
Ill use my current drive as a backup. Also take a look at this bench I did of my current hard drive. How much of an improvement will I see with two F3's in RAID 0 with my game loading times and so on? Small, medium...large improvement?

HDTune_Benchmark_ST3640623AS.png
 
I would never get any HDD for a RAID array outside of "enterprise level" (WD RAID Edition) drives since WD, Seagate, and Samsung have crippled all of their non-enterprise level drives. The error recovery that's built into the standard consumer drives conflicts with the RAID and actually drastically degrades performance.
 
Last edited:
Ethan3.14159 said:
I would never get any HDD for a RAID array outside of "enterprise level" (WD RAID Edition) drives since WD, Seagate, and Samsung have crippled all of their non-enterprise level drives. The error recovery that's built into the standard consumer drives conflicts with the RAID and actually drastically degrades performance.
Click to expand...

So what Hd do you recommend?
 
can i change an internal hardrive or an acer 4920 with a Western Digital Scorpio Blue WD10TPVT 1TB 5200 RPM 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s Internal Notebook Hard Drive? does it depend from laptop to laptop or can u use any hard drives?
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top