hdd setup question please

[molsen]

I have a couple questions about possible hdd setups...

>>>NUMBER 1<<<

could anyone please tell me what advantages and disatvantages i could have with this hdd setup:

(1) 36.7gb 10k RPM Raptor for OS
(2) 80gb 7.2k RPM Barracudas for storage, games, everything else.

I could put the 2 80gigs in RAID 0, but is there any way to involve the Raptor into a RAID array?


>>>NUMBER 2<<<

Also, I'm not that concerned about ALOT of storage space (I can always buy more space in the future). So if I wanted to save some money, would it be smarter to have:

a. (2) 80gb 7.2k RPM Barracudas in RAID 0, or

b. (1) 36.7gb 10k RPM Raptor with OS and
(1) 80gb 7.2k RPM Barracuda for everything else

<a> is cheapper but would be faster? $40 faster?

 

[weringo]

I would recommend 2 raptors for ultra fast loading time for your OS, applications and games that you play alot and then have an 80Gb drive for other games and music/files and things. If you cant afford this, 1 raptor will be sufficient and then have a 80gb drive for storage.

Two 7200rpm drives in raid0 are not going to be as fast a 1 raptor. You can see that this is true by looking at it like this:
The average seek time for a raptor is 5.2ms and standard sata 80gb drive is 9ms. Now if you put these two 80GB drives together, each drive is still going to have a 9ms seek time which means they will still be slower than the raptor. They are only going to benefit from being together in raid0 when you are copying lots of data which will mean you have 2 drives doing the work which should (but probably won't) half the time it would normally take to copy that data.

 

[molsen]

even with NCQ on the 80gigs?

 

[weringo]

even with NCQ on the 80gigs?

Dunno, but theres a raptor coming out soon using SATA2 with NCQ anyway