Need a new/quicker hard drive... any suggestions?

NYSpeed Automotive NYSpeed Off Topic
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Right now I have a 350gb WD Caviar 7200rpm SATA hard disk. It’s starting to show some early warning signs that it may be on it’s way out (hear a click every once in a while which I assumed was a case fan hitting something, but now believe it’s the HDD). It’s also slow as balls, seems to be the bottle neck in the system.

What are some decent high performance hard drives? I know the rapters used to be decent, not so sure these days though. What about the Seagate baracudas?

I believe Hitachi makes a SATA drive that runs at 10,000 RPM. Are these any good? Can you buy consumer level solid state hard drives yet? Would a raid setup be the way to go? I’ve heard positives and negatives about that though

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10k drives ftw… build a raid with 10k sata drives ftmfw… maybe go solid state if you have a bag of money to spend… but haven’t touched those yet just heard good things…

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punch the serial number into the western digital site, they may RMA it for you.

When I worked at the ebay place I would buy all the broken western digital hard drives from the owner, and RMA them to western digital for new ones.

I probably sold at least 50 drives this way.

As for my preference, I would go samsung. They are dead silent drives, and I have had great luck with them.

When you get a new drive steve, put a 80mm fan blowing across it. You really need to keep drive temps under 100 degrees F to keep them alive.

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I just built a new PC… Dual 10Krpm SATA 150G WD Raptors in a Raid 0 setup… (I’ve got the same setup at work just with dual 75G) and it’s fucking damn fast.

The only slight complaint on my work PC is they are slightly noisy when I’m really stressing them, but the ones at home are hidden in the noise of the CPU cooler fan.

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nice… I may go that way. I checked out the solid state drives and they’re way too expensive at the moment. Maybe after xmas I’ll pickup a 16GB SS drive for playing around with.

so to setup a raid 0 configuration, is it just a bios setting? I assume Vista would see it as a single drive, correct? I’ve never setup a raid array before so this will be a learning experience.

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Usually there is an option to enter the raid controller when the computer boots up…

You can then pick which drives you want in a container…

And yes once you setup the RAID it will show up to windows as 1 drive.

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Just get a single raptor X 150gb, 10k rpm, and theyre nearly 2x as fast as the 74gb 10k rpm WD drives… Around $200 though.

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fastest and cheapest hd ive ever owned.

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The one he has now is faster…

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i take it you never used a raptor lol

Go raptor steve, i have 2 and they fly.

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Would there be a big difference from a 7200 rpm raptor and a 10000 rpm raptor in a raid 0 configuration? Is spending the extra $$$ worth it in this situation?

I’ll probably grab an cheapo large capacity external HDD for misc storage and archiving then, since 150gb isn’t a whole lot of room these days

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If you put a pair of the 150’s into a Raid 0 you should get about 300G.

(I got 279G on the Raid 0 I setup last night with a pair of them).

The 10Krpm does make a good difference; if you just raided 2 of the 7200’s together you will see an increase as well, not as much as if you had 2 10K’s but still a difference.

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After reading all the reviews its not worth the price to me.

If you do get a raptor or 2 go with the X version, I’ve read up alot more people getting DOA hd’s that weren’t the x version.

I don’t need windows to load 2 seconds faster lol.

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Only if you are loading huge movie files, stuff like that.

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thanks for the heads up.

so, is the 350.00 price tag for 2 of these

worth the price difference of running 2 7200 RPM drives in a raid config for 150.00 cheaper?

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If im spending 200, i would prolly cough up the 150 more to run a raptor.

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I’m running the non “x” version of that one, and both mine worked great so far… Even though they’ve only been running about 20 hours right now… LOL

I just booted and formated the system last night.

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nice… thanks for the info folks :tup: :beer:

one last question though (or maybe more so a concern than a question). If one of the drives fail for whatever reason, am I pretty fuck fucked at that point?

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two 250gb 7200’s will be 70 percent faster than one raptor. But two raptors together vs two 7200’s thats just up to you if you are willing to spend the money.

and if one of the drives failed, you are fucked. Which is why most people do not store anything on raid setups, they are strictly used for games/etc.

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Something else not mentioned in this thread is how loud a single 10k drive is, let alone 2. If it’s going to be used somewhere that noise might be an issue, i wouldnt recommend them. Also, do you really need that little bit extra, at the risk of data loss, noise, and heat. If your just now noticing an old WD hdd getting slow, chances are for the price the raptors will be overkill.

If you need a quick, cheap fix with plenty of storage, sunday best buy will, once again, have the 320GB Seagate 7200.10 Hdd’s on sale for 59$. I got to them on black friday for the same price, and in raid 0 i get copy speeds of 45MB/s, and transfer speeds of 60-80MB/s (60 when i copied my music back from another raid0 w/ 2 160’s, and 80 when copying movies back)

Plus, that with a 5 year warranty makes for a great deal and knowing it’ll last forever. i’m debating on buying 2 more to do a mirrored setup, just in case an hdd goes.