Some things to keep in mind about RAID0 - 2 * 200 gig hard drives in RAID0 is 400 gigs of storage that is statistically twice as likely to fail (if you lose one drive, you lose everything, and you've got twice as many physical components that could go bad). For gaming, and general use, RAID1 is going to give you great read performance, which you want, with redundancy in case a drive fails. Also, you can always rebuild a failed RAID1 drive using a drive of higher capacity if you can't find an exact match (eg. if your 120 gig RAID1 array loses a drive, you can restore the redundancy using a 160 gig replacement, you just lose the extra capacity).
Another interesting consideration is that if you tie yourself to a RAID0 solution provided by the motherboard or an add-on controller, you are locked into that hardware solution. If your motherboard or controller fails in a year, you'd better pray you can find an exact replacement, because consumer level hardware solutions vary widely and rapidly, even across the same model or manufacturer (different chipsets, different BIOS revisions, etc.), otherwise your stripe set is useless.
A couple other thoughts about large drives - if you've got 200 gigs, or 400, in your example of RAID0, worth of data, how are you planning to back that up? Furthermore, if your big shiny new drives are running less than, let's say, 60-75% full, why pay for storage you aren't going to fill? Lower capacity drives are going to have either fewer platters (run cooler), or lower areal density on their platters (more tolerant of imperfections or physical shock damage).
If you truly need hundreds of gigs of online storage, you are better off with two or more smaller arrays providing redundancy (2 * RAID1), or even 1 * RAID5 (which requires a minimum of three drives, and still has the hardware dependency at the controller).
-Scott
Quote:
|
Originally Posted by arsenal
I guess it depends on what you want to do:
If you are a hardcore gamer, I would suggest the following:
AMD64 Dual Core (AMD is better for gaming)
2GB+ DDR 3200 Ram
A mother board that supports SLI (NVIDIA) or the ATI Version (can't remember the name). That way you can get 2 of the same video card, and they work together to process graphics information. Like the old (really old) Voodoo 2 PCI cards.
Hard drives: 2 x 200 GB plus hard drives ($115/each @ mem ex), or you can always go larger. SATA. I noticed SATA II HDs available, although I have no idea what that means.. SATA v2 maybe..and I would probably run them in a RAID 0 configuration.
Anything else (Sound card vs on board) I have no clue about. Although, I probably will end up picking up a sound card as well. The difference I hear is night and day between on-board sound vs an actual sound card.
|