I’m seriously thinking about either running raid 0 or getting the WD Raptor drives… but all this information and conflicting opinions just confuse me…
I’m in process of building an extreme set up,
EVGA 122-CK-NF68-AR 680i Sli Chipset Motherboard
Intel Quad Core QX6700 CPU or X6800???
Corsair Dominator 2X2048-6400C3DF DDR2-800 RAM
EVGA nVidia 8800GTX KO w/ACS3 GPU
As far as i can tell that’s pretty much the most extreme set up; non-overclocked, i can get on paper. Now with such a system i’m seriously worried about bottlenecks, wouldn’t it suck once i spent all that hard earned cash and found my HDD’s let me down something terrible!!!
I’m going with SATA-300 at least, but with all this contradicting views and info, i’m well confused, there doesn’t seem to be any real tests performed on obvious things, file transfers, boot ups, game loading speeds, program loading speeds…etc, all just program running performances, but surely thats when your RAM’s more important than your HDD??? I want things to load quick, save quick, write quick, read quick, and transfer quick!
Also I’ve seen the WD-RE enterprise drives which are gurranteed to an average of 1-Million hours, surely a couple of these drives in RAID 0, and a strict back up routine would prove more benificial than a WD Raptor drive or even just plain old SATA drive.
I can get 2 x 250GB WD RE drives for 50 cheaper than one WD 150GB Raptor, and i’ve read horror stories about Raptor failing big in the long term.
Also i’ve never had a drive failure ever, after extensive 5 years of usage… constantly reading/writing large 2-8GB files! When people’s RAID 0 drives crash is it because of their maintenance routines? Poor choice of Drives or other equipment? Operating conditions?.. or is it just because they run RAID 0???
Any suggestions???