HARDDRIVE - RECOMMENDATIONS?

[DrtyBlvd]

Does anyone recall the hard drive that Jason (I think) made comment on last year?

The frontpage detailed how it had resulted in a greatly increased speed of his system - I can't find it in the archives :cry: :?:

[mscdex]

Can you be more specific? PCMCIA hd, desktop hd, etc.?

[DrtyBlvd]

Apologies - For a Desktop :oops:

[Jason Dunn]

Does anyone recall the hard drive that Jason (I think) made comment on last year?

That would be the Western Digital - www.wdc.com

Their site seems down right now (I can't reach it) but you're looking for their series of drives with 8 MB of cache.

[DrtyBlvd]

A-Ha! Thank you Obi-Wan :lol:

Now - x2 120's or a 200? Can anyone tell me what the performance benefits or drawbacks are? Are there any??

[Janak Parekh]

Now - x2 120's or a 200? Can anyone tell me what the performance benefits or drawbacks are? Are there any??
Well, it depends on how you set them up. If you're comfortable with RAID, get a hardware RAID 0 card and plug in the two 120's into that -- it'll definitely be faster than one 200MB drive.

Drawbacks are cost of RAID card (not that much), more power, heat, space consumption.

If you want to really go insane, get 15000RPM Ultra160 SCSI drives. I got one for my souped-up PC, it flies. It's not cheap, though, and you need to set up cooling for it.

--janak

[DrtyBlvd]

Hmm - Do I need a RAID card or can I plug them straight into the MB?

[Janak Parekh]

Hmm - Do I need a RAID card or can I plug them straight into the MB?
Well, if your MB has RAID functionality, then you can do the same thing. You can certainly plug 2 hard drives into an ordinary MB as well, but you won't get the benefits of RAID striping; in that case, the only significant performance boost might come from putting the temp and swap files on a different hard drive than the main OS.

I guess one could theoretically do software RAID 0, but I'm not sure how much of a performance boost that could be.

--janak

[DrtyBlvd]

This is what the Abit site has to say on the MB:

RAID 0/1/0+1 (For RAID only)
Supports the most advanced ATA133 HDDs with RAID 0/1/0+1 onboard HPT372 RAID controller enables enhanced functionality and HDDs performance without the cost of additional add-on cards

I have no idea what it means though. Is it in English? :lol:

And I just ordered these - does the ATA being 100 Vs 133 make a dfference? Have I ordered the wrong sort :?: 8O

HAR120WESID728
120 GB Western Digital JB 7200rpm
IDE 8Mb cache ATA100

[Janak Parekh]

This is what the Abit site has to say on the MB:
Excellent! You have a Highpoint controller. You should have two special ATA133 ports on the mainboard. Ideally, you want to plug one hard drive into each of those ports, and then configure the two hard drives "together" into a RAID 0 array using the Highpoint BIOS (which should come up during bootup time). They'll then appear as one 240GB hard drive to the system, and should be blazing fast. You might need a special driver for Win2k/WinXP...

Check the mainboard manual and see if it has details on this.

By the way, if you configure your system this way, make sure you do backups of your important stuff. If either hard drive fails, the RAID array goes down and the contents of both drives are inaccessible.

And I just ordered these - does the ATA being 100 Vs 133 make a dfference?
Not hugely at this point. You should be OK. As long as you have the 7200rpm disks plus the 8MB cache...

--janak

[DrtyBlvd]

Janak -

Thank you for your time & input - much appreciated Sir!

When I plug it all in, and a little "Mushroom Cloud" appears over my MB, I'll be sure to scream for assistence :lol:

Now where did I put the *£*$%^£& MB manual again....

[Janak Parekh]

Now where did I put the *£*$%^£& MB manual again....
There should be a downloadable version from Abit's website.

Good luck. :)

--janak

[ironguy]

Guess what WD is coming out with on Feb 11?

http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/story.html?id=1044471776

Be patient, the link has been swarmed