Spring Cleaning

[Ian]

I've just bought a new hard drive and taken the plunge of re-setting up my PC 5 hours later and almost everything is back on there, but it's nice and fresh now!

Opted for a 250GB 16MB Cache SATA2 seagate drive with 5 years warrenty, and seems to be working fine Came to £57 roughly which wasn't too bad for my only upgrade in the last 1.5 years!

 

[Anon_F]

New Hard Drive

The cost of Hard Drives keep falling
So the customer's get a good deal
Have only filled my 250GB HDD with onlt 41GB of stuff & that includes my meagre music collection

 

[Rush]

By feckit

Have only filled my 250GB HDD with onlt 41GB of stuff & that includes my meagre music collection

Meagre would account for about 150 songs at half a gig ..is it that small ..DOH!
if not then you sure have some clutter on it

 

[floppybootstomp]

Well done Ian but remember to have some sort of backup, even if it's only a partition.

Perhaps you could back up vital stuff on your old hard drive.

I recently done a fresh install, can't exactly remember the reason why, but I've come to the conclusion 70Gb isn't enough for a main drive (2 x 35Gb WD Raptors in RAID 0).

I honestly can't load on all the games I want to play so I'm very likely going to get 2 x 75Gb WD Raptors to make a fresh RAID 0 config. That should be plenty (150Gb).

I will then use the two old Raptors for primary drive on another machine, which will free up 2 x SATA WD 120Gbs which I can add to main machine for storage.

I think main disk of 150Gb plus 240Gb for storage spread over two disks will be quite enough for now.

While we're on the subject my main system is now coming up for two years old (in August).

I kept considering upgrading from Socket A to Socket 939 but to be honest I was/am really quite happy with my current setup, I'd actually say it's best combination I've ever had, and I've had a few

It is:

DFI Lan Party Ultra II B Motherboard
2 x WD Raptor 35Gb in RAID 0
1 x 160Gb Samsung IDE for storage
1 Gig (2 x 512Mb) Corsair Value Select PC3200 Memory
XP3200 CPU at 2.4Ghz, stable
Leadtek 6800GT 256Mb Grafix
Tagan 480W PSU

And some other stuff

But while I've been dithering about upgrading, Socket 939 is being phased out and AM2 has arrived.

And Intel's Conroe chip arrives in July.

When I do eventually upgrade, gonna be a big (and expensive ) change.

Must say though, this DFI/AMD combo has been, and still is, really really good

 

[psd99]

hey flopps
with those Raptor drives

do u think there is big difference in speed from them an normal ide's or sata's?

nice setup there too
impressive

 

[floppybootstomp]

hey flopps
with those Raptor drives

do u think there is big difference in speed from them an normal ide's or sata's?

I know there's a difference.

This is a subject I've touched on many times.

Raptor drives give you a faster system, especially in a RAID 0 - fact.

I'm not talking about ATTO benchmarks either, although they are really very respectable.

I'm talking about real life everyday use - word processing, photoshop, web browsing, games, audio and video rendering/processing and more.

I've never used SCSI drives but I'd imagine these aren't far off.

And yes, they're bloody expensive, but they do have a long warranty.

Whether they're worth the money or not is a subjective issue.

The latest SATA 2 hard drives from the likes of Seagate and Samsung give benchmarks not that far from Raptor drives.

All I know is, I'm happy with my purchase and I'm looking to buy a couple more, in a bigger size

(I should mention, though, that the pair I currently own were purchased second hand online so I didn't pay full price originally)

 

[Ian]

Well done Ian but remember to have some sort of backup, even if it's only a partition.

Perhaps you could back up vital stuff on your old hard drive.

Yup, I've got the whole old drive intact until the new drive has everything set up on it again (bookmarks, e-mails etc...). Once thats done, I'm plonking the drive on my server to act as a backup drive with True Image

 

[Quadophile]

Ian,

Wish you good luck