How many users on here with multiple internal HDD have thier rig setup that one drive is solely for the O/s and small apps and a totally seperate prolly faster HDD for pure games.

I am re-doing my rig this weekend and I am seriously thinking of dropping the RAPTORS for just 2 Samsung F1 drives...One for O/s and the other pure games. I have a 500GB seagate for downloads and porn and then an external WD 1TB drive for my DSLR photos and back up.

I am thinking there should be not sacrifice of speed for not having the games on the O/s drive and TBH the samsungs are just as fast as the 2x75gig RAPTORS. In the day I got them they were class but I want space and they offer only a tad quicker service then the much bigger Samsungs.

Anyone with a similar setup on here.....seperate drives wise?

Hey Plug,

I would say go for it.... as in ridding the Raptors raid 0 for the single Samsung F1 1TB... its less hassle and risk.

The greatest thing you will be giving up is the seek time.. The Raptors are still king when it comes to seek times, all due to the 10k rpm...

BUT..... as for average read/write speeds.... which I think is more important, the Samsung F1 will do just as good and maybe even better than the out dated 1st gen Raptors. Now if they were the Velociraptors.... that might be a different story..

Go ahead and run HD Tach (the one i have is v. 3.0.1.0) to see the difference between your current Raptor raid 0 setup and the single Samsung F1.

I too went from a Raid 0 in my previous 4yr old system to a single primary hdd of my current system today. And the speed of my single hdd is faster than my previous raid 0 (back then, my raid 0 was faster than a single drive at that time). Back in the day... my raid 0 ( 2x120gb 7200rpm 8mb cache ) had a 85~90MB/s av. read against the same drives in single mode of ~60MB/s av reads... Today, my single WD 640gb 7200rpm 32Mb cache Black Edition does 98MB/s av. Pretty good improvement over the years in spinnie little platters.. Today my setup is primary hdd for everything and a secondary for backups, plus and external USB hdd for additional backup to the backup.

I would go your route of thinking unless you are giving thougts about Velociraptors in raid 0 or SSD like a Intel X-25M/E...... then this would be the ticket..

For simplicity and better performance compared to the past..... single hdd (640 or greater in size) is the way to go.

I would love to go with a SSD as my primary... but I just cant outputing the $$ for the Intel's X-25 (best of the best) at this point... but..... just like anything else... pricing will go down.

Everyone seems to get SSD to get their OS on and run games off conventional drives. I dont really see the point though, I mean SSDs have sick loading times but who cares about how fast OS loads? Windows 7 loads pretty fast and most ppl dont even shut their computers down anymore.

I think if you want all out speed.... It would be great to have a SSD as the primary hdd for OS/apps/games for the load times.... Then have a secondary mechanical hdd for data (stuff).... and finally have a third hdd, either internal or external, as a backup to the data and images of the primary SSD hdd for recovery.


The storage capacity of SSD is slowly creeping up there but I would like to see the pricing come down alot further...


Wouldnt it be great to be able to get a SSD with the performance of the Intel X-25M/E in a size around 500GB for around 150.00 bucks??? eheheheh we'll get there.... eventually.

I have 3 HDDs in my system, the primary drive is divided into two partitions, one for the OS + apps, the other for movies. Secondary drive is games only. And the third drive is for program installation files and pagefile.

Soviet, I do shut my computer almost every day. Why wouldn't I? I think that the cause of my psu fail was a power surge while my Pc was on Standby mode, plus I safe more energy, I think.

Also Plug I have this setup also, one drive for OS and programs and the other specifically for gaming! It makes me happy to keep things organized.

Meats,

Do you suffer from O.C.D by chance!!!! hehe.

I think it the way to go TBH, I mean I have drives here and it makes total sense to assign one to a particular task. I game like a mother f**ker I really do, Tam will tell you I am gaming all the time.

I will set it up 1TB drive for O/s (pure over kill I know) 1TB for games and the 500GB for my "ART"...

I will keep my externeal 1TB external for my back up for photos and sell my 2x75GB raptors.

I think that SSD are pure over kill at the moment even the price is insane and alot of the ones for sale at the moment are not even that good....just trying to cash in on the craze. And then you need an additional bracket to mount them in a machine.

So even if you DO shutdown your comp, how many times do you shutdown/restart it per day vs how many times you sit and wait for your games/programs to load?

If you do the second a lot more often then it only makes sense to use ssd's for that. Unless youre just a rich bish and can get ssd's for OS and gaming.

I turn my Pc on and off once maybe twice a day. I could get an SSD drive no probs, but whats the point......bragging rights. Meh!

Don't be a p***y Plug, get an SSD, then YOU CAN brag.

Could get one for my HD porn collection.....

Hey Plug-lie-wug-glie......................


Take a good look at this review on the 2TB Western Digital Black Edition....

it even nudges out the Velociraptor 300mb 10k....

man this thing flies.... (for a mechanical spinnie thingie)

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/storage/2009/10/02/western-di...k-review/1

What can I say, I'm old school.
Whenever possible I RAID 1 or 5 my system.
Not the fastest, but not the slowest either when you're talking RAID 5.
I like the stability.
I back up my data incrementally 3 times a week, system twice a month, and image about once every 2 months. I have about 1TB of data online going back to about 1995 and an additional offline store of about 3TB going back to 1990.
Not a single movie in the mix.

You might want to try a few cluster size configurations on your "game" disk as well. See if you get useful performance increase for your setup.

Might be interesting to find out if any other gamers have played with cluster size variants and if there's a "best" size for most of the more popular games.

Also, since one probably doesn't need to worry too much about journaling on a game repository disk, I wonder if configuring a disk as FAT v. NTFS v. other provides any significant gaming performance differences.

Same inquiry for enabling the indexing service on a disk.

I'm an intermittent gamer so have nowhere near the number of games to test any of those questions. Also don't have Win7 so couldn't do any evaluation for that OS.

http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/topic/74245/#559515

G. G. said:

Nice find G.G,

But I all over this badboy....I check bit tech every copule of hrs I love that site. It is a monster drive but the price of the thing does not warrant a purchase. Hell its dearer then SSD drives.

john albrich said:


Might look into this mate.....thanx

My setup is like this plug.I have two 300GB VelociRaptors (might grab a third one)in Raid 0 for my OS Windows 7 and games basically then i have two 500GB Seagates in Raid 0 for Vista Home Premuim and games.Then i have a 500GB External HD which i use for storage.I have everything on that HD from Games ISO's to Pictures and music.Im gonna need a bigger storage drive soon .And that Western digital looks great.I wonder if the 1.5GB or the 1TB is a as fast as the 2 TB since my External can only handlr 1.5TB's

Tom it is indeed a sweet drive but the price is crazy...and in some cases is beaten by a mid range samsung drive. If and when it drops in price (which it will) then its a KEEPER.