Upgrading hard drive

[Mooshie]

Im looking to upgrade my hard drive, but I have come to some trouble. My current 37.2GB hard drive can barely hold more than 2 games on it at a time, and thats if they arn't modern games. So I was searching around, and I saw some options.

I can either buy myself a 250-300GB hard drive that has seek times from 8-9.0ms seek times, or go with a smaller 73GB hard drive that has 4.5ms seek times. I know that 4.5 is a large difference from 8.0ms and a lot faster, but Im not sure if it would be woth sacrificing nearly 180GB of space. So I need more opinions. What do you guys think?

Here are the two hard drives I was looking at:

smaller/faster
Big/slow

[Pent uP Rage]

I run "old" IDE drives. I'd keep the 10,000 rpm HD for running Windows, and get a BIG one for games, pictures, etc.
Also, doing this will help slightly protect stuff away from your Windows install. If you ever have to reinstall Windows, you won't lose everything.
This is how I've got mine set up anyway.

[krazykarl]

get 2 midsized SATA (160-200gb) and RAID 0 them the speed is phenomonal and the cost of 2 160's is abt the same as one 300.

[Trajan]

I personaly have a 200GB SATA 7200 RPM HD with 8 MB Cache and it works great leaving me plenty of room with all my games installed.

[Marshal Qin]

moved to 'the basement'.

[Mooshie]

get 2 midsized SATA (160-200gb) and RAID 0 them the speed is phenomonal and the cost of 2 160's is abt the same as one 300.

Im not too familiar with "raid 0". What's the process?

[Kanaric]

to do a raid 0 you must have SATA or an ide raid card or motherboard with raid.

It combines both drives together and does whats called striping, it puts every other byte (or something like that) on each drive so it combines their space and speed into 1 drive. Its faster.

If you have 10k SATA drives its fast, its even fast if you got ATA100 drives, doen't really matter.

Its INSANE with ultra SCSI or SATA2 drives if you can do that.

It really isn't that much noticible though unless you play games with a lot of load times, like games that load levels a lot. Loading levels is basically the only hard drive intensive thing you do so imo its not really worth the money, unless you allready have raid and one drive allready and need the space, then do it. BTW, like Dual Channel ram you will need 2 IDENTICAL drives from the same manufacturer, if not it will not work properly.

[Mooshie]

Ah I see, thanks Kanaric. Unfortunatelly, I don't have SATA, a raid card, or a motherboard with raid. Does anyone know a hard drive that runs in between? Maybe a 6ms seek time and 150GB hard drive?

Edit: wait, I found something in my system info called "mraid35x" in system drivers. Would that be anything?

Edit x2: Also, anybody know where I can find detailed info on my motherboard to know if it supports these hard drives? I have a dell dimension 4600, and for some reason I can't find any info at all on my motherboard.

[krazykarl]

If you are willing to shell out an extra few bucks, SATA RAID controller cards are not very expensive anymore.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...6941&CatId=508
this is a link to one i found on tigerdirect.

and here is an article on RAID systems
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html

if you are so interested.

[squeaky]

If you don't have SATA, the raptor drives are only availible in SATA, so your only choice is the other one.
Personally, a raptor doesn't improve performance by much. It'll marginally improve load times, but for the most part you won't see the performance improvement

[Mooshie]

I think I'll buy the raid sata card and the raptor hard drive for now, and than the large memory hard drive later. I would like to have both hard drives, but I don't have the money at the momen. Thanks for the advice people.

[Mooshie]

If you are willing to shell out an extra few bucks, SATA RAID controller cards are not very expensive anymore.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...6941&CatId=508
this is a link to one i found on tigerdirect.

and here is an article on RAID systems
http://arstechnica.com/paedia/r/raid-1.html

if you are so interested.

Another question, will that card shown act as an adapter for IDE to SATA? Because I have IDE, so I'll need some kind of an adapter.