Need to know how to get my HardDrive at prime! Check it.

[Asuka]

I need to know everything there is to know about a Hard drive and making it rum at its best.

Formatting.
Raid.
Ultra or Serial (what else do they call it? EDEI? SATA?)
Defragging.
What company's last the longest are fastest? (this one is for when im building my quad 8800 pc)

And anything else you guys can help me with.


thx!

 

[giant384]

formatting and defragging dont make a difference at all on the drive except the more crap and larger hard drive you have the longer it will take to defrag/format. for the raid though i recommend running 2 western digital raptors in raid;they have drives that range 36gb,80gb, and 160gb. For storage i would personally choose a Seagate drive they are very reliable and ive had no problems with them. lastly SATA is your best choice.

 

[Asuka]

formatting and defragging dont make a difference at all on the drive except the more crap and larger hard drive you have the longer it will take to defrag/format. for the raid though i recommend running 2 western digital raptors in raid;they have drives that range 36gb,80gb, and 160gb. For storage i would personally choose a Seagate drive they are very reliable and ive had no problems with them. lastly SATA is your best choice.

Just so i get this straight.

SATA = Best

Raptors should be run in RAID. I have a 74gig 10,000rpm Raptor. How do i find out its running in Raid, Why is it good for it, what are the other options.

So you say Defragging/formatting a drive is pointless?

and finely Seagate > Western Digital?

 

[63]

If you went to a dedicated hardware forum they could probably help you out with much more depth.

 

[Naudian]

Just so i get this straight.

SATA = Best

Raptors should be run in RAID. I have a 74gig 10,000rpm Raptor. How do i find out its running in Raid, Why is it good for it, what are the other options.

So you say Defragging/formatting a drive is pointless?

and finely Seagate > Western Digital?

^
I'd say go with Serial-ATA over regular ATA.
I never fully knew what RAID was, I googled it and read some of this and some of this.
Basically you need two identical(preferably) hard drives to run a RAID configuration, a motherboard that supports it, and drivers.

About formatting/defragging, it's not pointless to defrag. You should do it every now and then.
Formatting however, well...I guess it depends on how good you are at cleaning out the junk software that may build up over time. I don't really think it's necessary to Format any more than 1-2 times a year, unless you have a serious problem that only formatting will solve.

I think you'd be pretty safe to just get another WD drive like the one you have now and set it up in RAID. For a storage drive I dunno, get whatever. Seagate sounds good to me.

Now about this PC. Did you say Quad-8800? Or Quad-core cpu + 8800?

 

[giant384]

well i meant western digital is better for running in raid so files will boot up faster. i only said seagate is the best choice because you can have a place to store movie,music etc. or things that aren't executables. also raid requires at least 2 drives which is called raid 0. in order for you to run in raid you will need to reinstall windows. when you the files are loading up to install, you will see some text that says 'press f6 if you would like to install raid or scis something'. i honestly am not an expert at hard drives but im sure you can find more answers from a dedicated hardware forum like http://www.extremeoverclocking.com or http://www.hardforum.com

 

[DreamThrall]

About RAID: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID

Short of it is, RAID 0 = Striping, meaning two or more disks in an array, and each disk stores an equal amount of each piece of data. So, for example, if I have a RAID 0 array with 2 disks, my operating system will see it as one disk that is as big as both of them. If I store a piece of information that is 2 bytes, one byte each will go on each disk (basically). Also, the disks should all be identical.

The upside is that theoretically, you should be able to read faster from the RAID 0 array since you're reading from two disks at once. The downside is that if one of the disks fails, you're SOL.

As far as defragging, it is ANYTHING BUT pointless. Defragging, is short for defragmenting. If your hard drive is fragmented, that means the bits of files on your hard drive are spread out over different parts of the hard drive, which means it has to seek to several different parts of the hard drive just to load that one file. This means slower load times, and possibly MUCH slower depending on how many fragments there are. I would recommend defragging at least once every 1-2 weeks, depending on how often you install, uninstall, download or delete things.