The Three-Year Itch

[JPD]

It's been more than three years since I last built myself a PC. It's
that time again.

I'm planning on a P4 3.2 this time, with XP Pro, mostly to run MS
Office apps, Photoshop, Finale (music notation), occasional gaming,
home-recording/editing of guitar-playing and MIDI, and video-editing.

My main question right now is what to use for hard drive(s). In past
machines I've built or upgraded, I simply bought a new IDE drive and
used the previous drive as an internal backup or secondary drive.
Nothing fancy. But now I'm wondering if I want to get into SCSI, SATA,
RAID, or who knows what. Should I plunge into a more involved HDD
subsystem?

For instance, what about having Seagate Cheetah 15k SCSI drive for the
OS and programs, and another 15k Cheetah for whatever else. In the
"old days" it was often recommended to place the OS on one drive and
data on another, giving a nice performance boost -- especially for
digital audio workstations (DAWs) -- but I've never tried it. Does
that advice still apply?

I'm not as concerned about expense as I am about no-hassle reliability
and snappy performance. SATA sounds too new to be really reliable, and
RAID setups sound like a lot of hassle. Am I on the right track in
thinking SCSI, or should I just stick with plain old PATA? If PATA,
are two internal drives -- one for OS/progs and the other for data --
better than one?

Plan A, the simplest, would be to buy a 160GB Barracuda IDE drive for
$80 (CompUSA), use it as the C: drive, and back up to an external
drive.

Plan B might be to buy a Seagate SCSI 15k.3 as the C: drive and back
up to an external drive.

Plan C might be to use two internal drives, SCSI or IDE, and back up
to an external drive.

Plan D could be a couple of internal SATAS -- WD Raptors, let's say --
and back up to an external drive.

Plan E might be to have multiple internal drives in a RAID array --
SCSI or IDE -- which might give me some extra performance and/or
security (I guess), but at the cost of greater complications?

So, should I Keep It Simple, or should I look into a more involved
sort of HDD subsystem? I don't mind initial complications in getting
it set up, as long as it runs reliably, easily, and FAST after I get
it set up.

Any help will be greatly appreciated!

JPD

 

[Richard Dower]

It's been more than three years since I last built myself a PC. It's
that time again.
My main question right now is what to use for hard drive(s). In past
machines I've built or upgraded, I simply bought a new IDE drive and
used the previous drive as an internal backup or secondary drive.
Nothing fancy. But now I'm wondering if I want to get into SCSI, SATA,
RAID, or who knows what. Should I plunge into a more involved HDD
subsystem?

Two SATA Raptors in RAID 0 is all you need:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-160&depa=0

 

[Mac Cool]

(e-mail address removed) (JPD) said:

It's been more than three years since I last built myself a PC. It's
that time again.

I'm planning on a P4 3.2 this time, with XP Pro, mostly to run MS
Office apps, Photoshop, Finale (music notation), occasional gaming,
home-recording/editing of guitar-playing and MIDI, and video-editing.

déjà vu

 

[Dick Sidbury]

It's been more than three years since I last built myself a PC. It's
that time again.

I'm planning on a P4 3.2 this time, with XP Pro, mostly to run MS
Office apps, Photoshop, Finale (music notation), occasional gaming,
home-recording/editing of guitar-playing and MIDI, and video-editing.

None of these applications require any more than vanilla disk
configuration, IMHO. With video-editing and home recording you'll need
lots of space. I'd probably recommend a pair of SATA drives of the
largest capacity that you can afford. SATA is about 10 dollars more
than IDE and you have given no indication that you;d need SCSI.

What I;'ve done with a configuration like this is to make the first
drive partitioned into several disks: C for O/S, utilities, and any
software that is associated with hardware. The second partition would
be for applications: Office, Photoshop, the third patition for games if
you have enough games, and the fourth partition for data, except for
video, audio and game data. I put game data on the game partion, and
the video and audio data on the second disk. I save copies of my
configuration files, registry, etc on my data disk. My Documents
basically points to its real location on the data drive and contains a
subdirectory for downloads.

Obviously YMMV.

dick

 

[JPD]

(e-mail address removed) (JPD) said:


déjà vu

All over again.

Actually, I thought I was posting it to hardware.storage, and didn't
see my mistake until too late.

Thanks for the nice list of links earlier. Kept me busy and out of
trouble for a few hours.

JPD

 

[JPD]

I'd probably recommend a pair of SATA drives of the
largest capacity that you can afford. SATA is about 10 dollars more
than IDE and you have given no indication that you'd need SCSI.

But would SCSI be noticeably faster than SATA? I can get a pair of
15k.3 Cheetah 73GB drives for half-price (~$200 each), and I don't
mind spending the money if I'm going to see a nice performance
improvement over the SATAs. Or are you saying that I wouldn't see much
improvement?

What I've done with a configuration like this is to make the first
drive partitioned into several disks: C for O/S, utilities, and any
software that is associated with hardware. The second partition would
be for applications: Office, Photoshop, the third patition for games if
you have enough games, and the fourth partition for data, except for
video, audio and game data. I put game data on the game partion, and
the video and audio data on the second disk. I save copies of my
configuration files, registry, etc on my data disk. My Documents
basically points to its real location on the data drive and contains a
subdirectory for downloads.

THAT'S the kind of specific advice I was hoping for. Thank you very
much!

JPD