I am building a simple gaming machine, I’ll add my current possible Specs before I ask Questions…
*Custom Case W/ 2 top, 2 front, 1 side and 1 rear fan
*AMD Phenom II X4 965 Black Edition Quad Core 3.4 GHZ
*8GB DDR3 1600 RAM (Corsair Dominator W/DHX Technology)
*Nvidia GTX 460 – 1GB – Palit Sonic Platinum Overclocked core 800Mhz
*Motherboard ( Gigabyte GA-870A-UD3 — AMD 870 w/ 2x PCI-E 2.0 x16 )
*1000 Watt — Extreme Gaming Series PSU
* [8X Blu-Ray] LG BLU-RAY Reader, DVD±R/±RW Burner Combo Drive – Black
* Killer 2100 Gaming Network Card
* Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64-BIT
*Razer Lycosa Gaming Keyboard
* Razer Lachesis 4000dpi 3G Laser Gaming Mouse – Black
I am going to get dual 500 GB hard drive’s — 16M Cache, 7200 RPM, 3.0Gb/s.
My first question is about what RAID option should I do, 0 or 1? I understand that Raid 0 will utilize both drives so my space is actually both drives making it 1TB space, but I’ll lose all data if just 1 dies. All I can find out about Raid 1 is that I only get the space of 1 drive out of 2 of them and they won’t lose data unless both crash. I am using it mainly for Gaming and internet stuff. All my personal stuff ie. Photos, movies, Family stuff and school work are all on an External Hard drive.
I was told Raid zero will help loading screens and such with speed of loading since it can read data from both drives simultaneously, is this true and in what way does it read the drives? Some data on one and some on the other? Which raid would you choose if it was strictly for gaming and not too worried about data loss as much?
Second part: I am currently using a pre built HP desktop I bought years ago and It has 1 365Gb hard drive (C:) and one I cannot even use (D:). I understand D is for if my other fails, What type of hard drive would I use just for a fail safe if my 2 main fail and I need the back up of windows info? Whats the type of drive and how could I make it so I can’t touch any files on it until needed?
What’s the difference between a solid state drive, S-ATA 3.0, Primary hard drive and a Data hard drive?
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Forget RAID, especially RAID O. The speed gain is minimal, if any, and the risk of data loss is relatively large.
Read this:
http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=29
SSDs tend to be faster and way more expensive. At the moment, only Win7 has the necessary software to run these efficiently.
SATA 3.0 is the fastest current SATA spec.
The D: drive on your HP isalmost certainly a partition of the primary drive and is used for system recovery. You could use it if you wanted to, but it’s probably best to leave it as is in the event you need it. A drive image on an external drive would be a good fail-safe.
The primary drive contains the OS, and the Data drive, if used, contains your personal files.
Forget RAID, you can use both hard drives without raid. One will be drive C, the other Drive D. Drive C is your primary hard drive, where you can install windows and programs on, and drive D would be your data hard drive, where you can save your music/porn/photos/backups/etc on. You can also back up your windows installation on your data hard disk/drive just in case anything bad were to happen.
Hard drives have to be partitioned, and your HP computer has 2 partitions, with 2 independent file systems, C, and D. D is simply a Windows installation medium, and C is the primary file system. When you build your own computer you will need to buy windows, so you will have a Windows CD/DVD that will be your installation medium.
SATA is a type of interface, kinda like USB, but it is mostly used for internal components like CD ROM drives and HDDs/SSDs. SATA 3 is a newer version of SATA that supports faster data speeds, but it is useless at the time because no hard drive is too fast for SATA II.
A hard drive has metal disks that spin inside, metal is hard compared to plastic, hence the name “hard disk”. A solid state drive is like a giant flash drive, and it has no moving parts, hence the name “solid state”, so it is quieter, stronger, and faster, but they generally don’t last as long.
RAID lets you use two hard drives as one, but you don’t need to do that, so you should not worry about it in your first build. RAID 0 simply makes both HDD (Hard Disk Drives) clones of each other so if one fails the other one works, and it slightly increases performance, and raid 1 treats it like 1 hard drive. 2 or more hard drives will work perfectly without RAID.
If you have any questions, feel free to email me at aminy23@gmail.com
i built a pc in march with specs similar to yours but i went with a ssd boot drive and a 1TB data drive win7 boots fast around 30 seconds from power on cold boot. there are a lot of ssd vs hdd boot time videos on youtube makes a raptor hdd look slow