Looking to pick up THE biggest and fastest internal HDD available for dekstops

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runo

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So hey guys, yet another "Runo, that's dumb." thread! I have a third 3.5" drive bay in my Cooler Master Storm Scout that's currently empty. Though I'm not running out of space, the problem is my current drives are a SAMSUNG SpinPoint 500GB for my boot drive (awesooome!) ... and a 320GB Caviar Blue (not so awesome...) running as my data drive. As you can see, that means my load times on vidyjah games are utterly abysmal no matter what HDD I load them up on -- because they either share space on my boot drive or they're on a pretty mediocre data drive.

Right now, I have over 150GB of games on my 500GB drive and the OS on there as well (about 190 gigs in use, out of 465). The 320 gig WD Caviar Blue has about a hundred gigs of songs, music videos, and whatever's related to games that don't really need a fast drive (like patches, mods, maps and skins and other custom content). What I'd really like to do is toss out the Blue drive completely, so with that in mind, the options I foresee are to either:

a. copy over all my Caviar Blue drive's contents to my SpinPoint and replace the Blue with a one-to-two terrabyte hard drive, moving my games and browsers over to the new HDD for a total of two drives
OR
b. put in a new, third 1 / 1.5 / 2TB drive like a BAWSS and keep the Caviar Blue in case I ever somehow run out of space (I don't use a lot of space, so this option is kinda 'meh')
OR
c. RAID setup on a couple of 1TB drives?

My motherboard is SATA-III capable, so I was eying the 64MB cache, 6GB/s HDDs like this one, but I'm hoping to hear from you guys as to what the greatest non-SSD is that money can buy.



Here's a quick cheat sheet to look at to help you help me!:
Budget?: Recently had a birthday, so -- Up to $170 preferred, $100-$150 is the sweet spot; able to push to up to $200 for a single drive but no more than that much total for two drives
Space Requirement: 1TB needed, can wittle down to 750GB if I have to for performance, but would prefer up to 2TB (but no more than two)
# of HDDs Required?: 1-2
Mobo Supports?: SATA-III up to 6.0GB/s with up to a 64MB cache
RAID?: I could easily be convinced to pick up, say, two 1TBs to put them in RAID-1 for optimal read speeds. However I don't really know how RAID setups work, just to forewarn you all!
Purpose?: I want to move all my games to the new drive and have room left over for a FRAPS video or a few. I don't record a lot of videos, and I never use a whole lot of space, so I probably don't really need more than 1.5TB but... eh.
 
Well if you want the biggest hd available within your price range, I would suggest this 1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245

Now mind you that the speed isnt as fast as the 1 you posted, but this 1 has been given more ratings. Just so you know, the biggest & fastest isnt always the best out on the market, so you need to choose smart on this. Thankfully ive only had 1 issue w/ a hard drive in all my techie life (which was my fault, accidently dropped it). Also if you want to RAID 2 drives together, then be sure to wait for either Phobus or reflex to come in & talk w/ you about that. As far as I remember, you gotta be extremely careful when it comes to getting hds into a Raid setup because you have to be real careful if you decide to move to the desktop (in case you want to go to a lan party or wanna go 2 a friends place & game). If thats not gonna happen, then I wouldnt worry bout the Raid setup.

Heres a great hard drive in case you want to Raid it w/ another & itll fit within your price range along with being the biggest & fastest http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148697
 
Would you be interested in running two or more hard drives. Not sure if it'd fit in your budget, but maybe if you used a 10k RPM hard drive for the OS and games, and then use a second, large HDD (750GB- 1.5TB) as your storage drive for music, videos, etc... PC and games will boot up and load quickly, and you get that huge space to store your stuff on still.

I'm pretty sure SSDs are out of your price by about $50 or so, and even that's just for one SSD.
 
Raid 0 on 2 drives will probably be your best bet. The process is a bit involved, but you will see the biggest performance gains over a single hdd. Samsung spinpoints are good drives and WD makes good drives too. I would suggest 2x 500gb drives for the array.
 
runo said:
So hey guys, yet another "Runo, that's dumb." thread! I have a third 3.5" drive bay in my Cooler Master Storm Scout that's currently empty. Though I'm not running out of space, the problem is my current drives are a SAMSUNG SpinPoint 500GB for my boot drive (awesooome!) ... and a 320GB Caviar Blue (not so awesome...) running as my data drive. As you can see, that means my load times on vidyjah games are utterly abysmal no matter what HDD I load them up on -- because they either share space on my boot drive or they're on a pretty mediocre data drive.

Right now, I have over 150GB of games on my 500GB drive and the OS on there as well (about 190 gigs in use, out of 465). The 320 gig WD Caviar Blue has about a hundred gigs of songs, music videos, and whatever's related to games that don't really need a fast drive (like patches, mods, maps and skins and other custom content). What I'd really like to do is toss out the Blue drive completely, so with that in mind, the options I foresee are to either:

a. copy over all my Caviar Blue drive's contents to my SpinPoint and replace the Blue with a one-to-two terrabyte hard drive, moving my games and browsers over to the new HDD for a total of two drives
OR
b. put in a new, third 1 / 1.5 / 2TB drive like a BAWSS and keep the Caviar Blue in case I ever somehow run out of space (I don't use a lot of space, so this option is kinda 'meh')
OR
c. RAID setup on a couple of 1TB drives?

My motherboard is SATA-III capable, so I was eying the 64MB cache, 6GB/s HDDs like this one, but I'm hoping to hear from you guys as to what the greatest non-SSD is that money can buy.



Here's a quick cheat sheet to look at to help you help me!:
Budget?: Recently had a birthday, so -- Up to $170 preferred, $100-$150 is the sweet spot; able to push to up to $200 for a single drive but no more than that much total for two drives
Space Requirement: 1TB needed, can wittle down to 750GB if I have to for performance, but would prefer up to 2TB (but no more than two)
# of HDDs Required?: 1-2
Mobo Supports?: SATA-III up to 6.0GB/s with up to a 64MB cache
RAID?: I could easily be convinced to pick up, say, two 1TBs to put them in RAID-1 for optimal read speeds. However I don't really know how RAID setups work, just to forewarn you all!
Purpose?: I want to move all my games to the new drive and have room left over for a FRAPS video or a few. I don't record a lot of videos, and I never use a whole lot of space, so I probably don't really need more than 1.5TB but... eh.
Click to expand...

If you are having performance issues regarding your hard drive, I can tell you right now that having your games and your OS on the same drive isn't that much of a performance hit as you may think. Also, one of the problems I see is that you are using a Caviar Blue drive, which is not built for performance. The Caviar Black series is the only drive from Western Digital you should ever buy. I use strictly Caviar Black drives in my desktops and servers.

You are saying you want what the best is. Well, if you really say that - what is your budget? If you want the fastest HDD setup, then you need to invest in a dedicated RAID card and SAS or SATA III drives.

If you know what your budget is, you know what type of HDD setup you can build. Otherwise I could price you out an entire $1,000 setup for a RAID away that will blow the doors off of any performance statistics you've ever seen with hard drives.

Let me know your budget and I can help you pick and choose the right combination of controllers and drives.

pillar said:
Well if you want the biggest hd available within your price range, I would suggest this 1: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822152245

Now mind you that the speed isnt as fast as the 1 you posted, but this 1 has been given more ratings. Just so you know, the biggest & fastest isnt always the best out on the market, so you need to choose smart on this. Thankfully ive only had 1 issue w/ a hard drive in all my techie life (which was my fault, accidently dropped it). Also if you want to RAID 2 drives together, then be sure to wait for either Phobus or reflex to come in & talk w/ you about that. As far as I remember, you gotta be extremely careful when it comes to getting hds into a Raid setup because you have to be real careful if you decide to move to the desktop (in case you want to go to a lan party or wanna go 2 a friends place & game). If thats not gonna happen, then I wouldnt worry bout the Raid setup.

Heres a great hard drive in case you want to Raid it w/ another & itll fit within your price range along with being the biggest & fastest http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148697
Click to expand...

RAID comes in many different flavors, serves different functions, and costs a varying amount due to hardware requirements.

These are the "standard" RAID setups found in an average IT environment:

RAID0 - data striping. Requires two drives, which the data is striped across. Loss of one drive results in loss of all data in most cases.

RAID1 - Data Mirroring. Requires 2 drives and data is copied from the primary drive to secondary drive in the mirrored pair. Slower write speed, but no affect on reading. However, if one drive fails the other drive will allow the system and data to keep functioning.

RAID5 - Data striping w/parity disk. Allows data to be striped like RAID0, but includes a parity disk in case one drive fails. RAID set would still be functional.

RAID6 - Data striping w/2 parity disks. Same as RAID5, but faster, and it can take two drives failing before data loss.

RAID10 - Mirrored pairs, striped. Requires minimum of 4 disks, and total disks must be an even number. Data is mirrored between pairs of disks, and then the pairs are striped. Can sustain failure of 1 drive in every pair. If one pair loses both drives, data is lost most of the time (although I have been able to recover data in cases where the RAID controller "offlines" the RAID set before corruption can occur in this case).

RAID is not a one-all solution. In fact, you may get better performance with single disks in a JBOD format (just a bunch of disks), with each disk on it's own port as it's own volume.

However, for PURE performance and fault tolerance, RAID6 and RAID10 are your best bets, but RAID6 is hard to find in a controller. I know Areca controllers support RAID6 and they are amazingly fast, but I prefer RAID10 because it's more common to find.

Hardware RAID controllers will always outperform software RAID solutions. Windows has built in SWRAID, called "Dynamic Disks". I do believe it only supports RAID0, RAID1, and RAID5, but I will have to check on that.

Linux does the same thing as well, but is a bit more complicated.

RAID also has nothing to do with portability, but obviously can't be used in a laptop unless your laptop has two hard drives.

Snipeye said:
Would you be interested in running two or more hard drives. Not sure if it'd fit in your budget, but maybe if you used a 10k RPM hard drive for the OS and games, and then use a second, large HDD (750GB- 1.5TB) as your storage drive for music, videos, etc... PC and games will boot up and load quickly, and you get that huge space to store your stuff on still.

I'm pretty sure SSDs are out of your price by about $50 or so, and even that's just for one SSD.
Click to expand...

Get away from the 10K RPM fallacy. Raptor drives and old SCSI drives at 10K RPM were great when they came out. However, with the ever increasing performance of standard 7200 RPM hard drives, they are pretty much evenly matched.

Performance in RAID is determined by the number of spindles in the RAID set (RAID10 especially). More 7200 RPM disks in a RAID set can outperform a smaller set of 10K RPM drives.

One of the biggest performance issues you need to look at is the cache size. Higher cache will allow you to have a higher data throughput.
 
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My budget's about $200 for up to two drives but I'd prefer to spend no more than ~$175ish, shipped or not. And yeah, I'm not really sold on Raptors. I was eying one of the 64MB SATA-III @ 6GB/s drives like the 2TB HDD I linked - that's pretty good, yeah?
 
From my understanding of the Western Digital drive you linked, there are problems regarding it's use in RAID arrays and cooling issues.

With that being said, bad drives happen a lot. However, I myself would recommend sticking with proven SATA II drives if you can. SATA III is still a new technology, so I am sure they are working out all the issues.
 
CrazyKiller said:
From my understanding of the Western Digital drive you linked, there are problems regarding it's use in RAID arrays and cooling issues.

With that being said, bad drives happen a lot. However, I myself would recommend sticking with proven SATA II drives if you can. SATA III is still a new technology, so I am sure they are working out all the issues.
Click to expand...

Exactly what I was thinkin on that last statement. Its better to put your $$ on current technology because the manufacturers have taken care of most (if not all) of the tech issues. I went from having 2 pata drives & 1 sata 1st gen drive to just 1 sata 2nd gen drive & 2 external drives.
 
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