Need advice on raid 0 HD

[Anoni Moose]

Looks good to me. Great MB (that’s the one I use) but with the cheapness of drives nowdays, I’d perhaps make the ‘C’ drive a more normal price-optimized sized one (300~500G) and perhaps partition it to a smaller ‘C’ drive and a larger other partition to use for “other stuff”. Wouldn’t want power work areas in that other section because it’s still the boot drive (you’d use your RAID-0 array for that), but you’d have a lot of storage space for very little additional money. Ideally you’d have a third drive (not the RAID “single” drive or the boot physical disk) where your swap-file would go, but wouldn’t add one just for that.

[Frenchie29]

That’s a good I dea so maby 3x500gb 2 raid 0 for NLE and partition 1 for the C drive (what size would be good??) and the rest as another drive right??

[Terje A. bergesen]

Personally I wouldn’t go near WD. Serious quality issues for years now. I have had to replace more Caviar drives than any other drives I have ever used.

Other than that your configuration seems reasonable.

—
Terje A. Bergesen

[Frenchie29]

All my drives are maxtors but I heard that WD is better!!!

What’s a good brand??

How much space should I assign to my C drive??

and what’s the difference between sata and sata II??

[Adam Rose esq.]

drive choice is pretty difficult, ie what works for one doesn’t work for another
eg my WD have never failed, but bad experience with Hitachi / IBM a while back
Some maxtors have a bad rep (eg series 9 IIRC) but the 10s are supposed to be good

FWIW, my current drives of choice are Samsung. Good, reliable, quiet. I like.

sata I vs sata II is virtually a non-issue. Lot of hullabaloo but doesn’t make much real world diffs.

Personally, I prefer a C: of about 40-80GB. I don’t like too much stuff on C – used to make do with about 20GB but now a bit bigger, esp for catalog files for my digital juice stuff + google desktop indexes etc.

Am busy building machine for self with E6600, 2GB, Asus P5B-E Plus and using a 160GB for system: 40 for C, about 100 for D (data) and small chunk for E (page file etc)

[Janet Turner]

MP –

I’m getting a new computer built and went with three 320 gig SATA Seagate drives. I have never had problems with Western Digital but I had several Maxtors fail. I don’t know what Maxtors are like now since I quit using them about four years ago.

Grasshopper

[Frenchie29]

I know I heard bad things about Maxtors too but never had a problem (knock on wood) but just too be on the safe side I won’t be going back with them

[Anoni Moose]

Yes, that sounds like a good idea. Someone else mentioned 80G for the ‘C’
drive, and that’s probably a good number.

There’s a couple theories on how to do things. Some might have
you have only a 20-30G partition and have ONLY the OS put there,
then have another partition for the programs. Because programs
always like to default installation to “C:\Program Files” and
because I think it’s a very good idea to go along with defaults,
I’d suggest a ‘C’ drive that includes all the installed
programs that’s maybe 80~100G (which would include your swap file
and your “System Restore” space). Then partition the rest as another
disk. So you’d probably end up with C:, D: (raid), and E: (other partition
of the C-disk). Although in XP at least, they can be changed (although
I’d leave C as C). I put my RAID pair as “V” for my video disk (but
then I’ve five or six drives).

As far as brands are concerned, I currently favor Seagate drives. Maxtor
is the only one that I’d consider one that I’ve had more trouble with
overall. Maxtor was recently purchased by Seagate and the Maxtor brand
name is being retained for use as Seagate’s low-end consumer line of disks.
Hopefully the quality level is improving with new owner.