My first ALIENWARE. Overkill? Maybe. Advice?

[PP Mguire]

Well no matter what he gets its still gonna be fast no matter what. its deff faster than what i got cause i have a 5400rpm ata100 HD so yea lol. its faster tha nwhat i got and ppl need to apreciate what they got. BTW i have no idea where this is goin lol.

 

[NJRonbo]

The other RAID is RAID 0 in which the two drives "share" the workload and so you actually have the full amount of storage of both drives PLUS all your loading times and file transfer times will be SIGNIFICANTLY faster because the hard drives are sharing the work!

Interesting.

I always thought a RAID setup meant that whatever
you put on drive A is automatically copied to drive B
as backup so essentially you only have the amount of
space available that drive A provides.

So what you are saying is that with the RAID 0 setup
I am getting the benefit of 2 74GB 10,000 RPM drives.

This is a nice idea, but my only concern is that I only
have just over 140GB available to me rather than if
I went 74 GB (10,000RPM) on drive A and 250GB
(72,000RPM) on drive B.

 

[ImUseless]

With RAID 0 you would spread data BETWEEN
the 2 drives which is not really ideal if data backup
is crucial but you do increase performance. But when
one drive fails youve lost the data from BOTH drives
because remember that data writes partially to the first
drive and the remainder will be written to the second drive,
again, for performance and NOT when your DATA is critical
or the Losing of it if you will.

As far as I know, to date there is no software available yet
that can save or repair the corrupted data from the single
drive that fails.

With RAID 1 your second drive MIRRORS your first drive and this
is done when data retreival or backup is important. But in effect
you only have 1 drive at the cost of 2 but you also have a reliable
backup system in the form of a mirrored C or primary drive which
makes backing up very simple and automatic.

 

[ShoobieRat]

He's powering a large monitor at high resolutions. I think the RADEON x850 is a very good choice.

Also for the hard drives you have the wrong idea. There are two types or RAID. RAID 1 is what you are talking about, where one drive "mirrors" the other and so if you have 2 74 gb drives you would only have 74 gb of storage. The other RAID is RAID 0 in which the two drives "share" the workload and so you actually have the full amount of storage of both drives PLUS all your loading times and file transfer times will be SIGNIFICANTLY faster because the hard drives are sharing the work!
Alienware DOES offer a RAID 0 setup with two 74gb 10,000 rpm raptors in RAID 0!! THIS IS WHAT YOU SHOULD GET!!!
This would be INCREDIBLY fast plus you will have 2X74 = 148 GB of total storage!!!
I hope you understand what I mean, I honestly think this is your best bet. With all of the rest of you system being so fast you might as well have some really fast hard drives!

And you can always add in a large 7200rpm hard drive like 300gb or whatever later for storage!!!!!!!!!!!!!

What a bloody waste of money and effort.

First off, this guy's going to use it for work. Why the hell would someone with critical business information put their stuff onto a RAID-0 setup? Especially with two dinky 74gb drives. That's just retarded. Not only is he hasseling over a pathetic amount of space, but he's doubled the possibility of having a HDD failure and if one goes, he loses it all.

If he wants 148gb seamless storage, he should just use a 200gb drive, which will cost him less, be easier to manage, and he won't need to mess with RAID.

Besides, the fact that he really hasn't stated what he's going to be doing with the computer, hasn't slated for the cost of a 10Grpm drive over a normal 7200. If he's not going to be gaming, just about ANY graphics card from today back to about 4 years ago will support his big monitor just fine. 2D graphics are a synch. I'm sure some of you will argue that he needs to lay down another $300 so he can have some big beefy card for games he's never gonna play and the ability to animate the Windows search dog in full detail...

bah...

 

[NJRonbo]

Shoobie,

You have been of great help.

You wrote an outstanding read a few posts
back that I took into great consideration.

I am not fond of using two 74GB drives in a
raid setup. I am losing valuable storage space.

I *would* like to compromise and put a 74GB
(10,000RPM) as my HOST and a 250GB (7,000RPM)
as my slave.

I get the best of both worlds this way. I put my
OS on the 74GB for faster bootup and all my
essential programs for faster response.

The rest I can put on the slower 250GB drive.

You okay with that?

Also, I know you are pushing for a cheaper video
card. Are you certain a 128MB card will not only
power my Dell 24" FP monitor but also all the
photo editing software I will be using?

Thanks for all your help.

 

[alecjahn]

Well, technically, since your drives will be SATA there won't be any master/slave configurating.

It sounds like a great setup.

Yes, basically any card will work. I would probably get something recent, yet bottom of the line.

16MB cache versus 10,000RPM drives are no competetion, the faster RPM is the better solution. Yes, the cache will be faster than accessing files directly from the platters, but you have to realize it'll only benefit 16MB worth of data. The rest will still be accessed at 7200RPM speed.

10,000RPM drives means that all data on the drive is accessed faster. Yes, it won't access it as fast as the cache but you'll be able to access all all of your files faster rather than just a small chunk.

Yes, I know. I was just giving it as an alternative to spending a lot of money on a 74 gb, really fast drive, when you could get a drive that performs almost as good (i've seen the numbers, and theyre nice!) and be able to get it in 250GB+ drive sizes. And not spend a fortune.
BUT, since it's a maxtor-only thing, (seemingly) it kinda screws the deal. I dont ever want a maxtor ever again. Unless it was free.

 

[ShoobieRat]

Yeah, a 10Grpm drive as your primary wouldn't be a bad deal. Of course, it all depends on how much file-managment you do. If yer an Exporer freak, constantly sorting stuff and moving wads of stuff around, or you need things to come up the instant you click, then a 10Grpm is good. Otherwise, you'll get good performance out of a cheaper 7200 drive.

As for the video card, a 128mb card will do just fine for graphics editing. Remember, it's not the memory on the card that you need to focus on. Since yer not gaming, yer not holding wads of crap in storage. What you want is a good GPU, combined with a fast CPU. Get something relatively new, and with your spec'd CPU for that box, you'll be fine. Besides, you can always upgrade later on.

 

[dale5605]

Shoob, you didn't need to be so derogatory in responding to my post. You have no idea what you are talking about. I have never in my life had a hard drive fail on me or anybody I know. So why in the hell would you even mention that? I was talking about using the RAID 0 setup to run Windows and his programs, so that IF the array did fail he wouldn't lose anything important. He would keep some of the important stuff on that RAID, but most of it on the larger 7200rpm drive. So what you said is pretty much irrelevant. And I have used a regular hard drive compared to a RAID setup, there is a huge difference and if his computer is this good he might as well have some fast hard drive setup, that's the reason I suggested the RAId of the raptors.
You need to grow up and get a clue what you are talking about before you start acting like a know-it-all.

 

[alecjahn]

You didnt seem to make any of that clear in your previous posts. You obviously didn't make everything very clear, considering there is controversy and confusion.

Shoobie was doing a very fine job of sorting everything out into an understandable manner. I strongly believe he knows what he's talking about.

 

[dale5605]

I said he could add in a 300gb hard drive for storage, so generally the idea is that you can store stuff on that and run everything else on the raptors.