Hard drive and RAID recommendations

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Rachner

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Building a new system that will be used some for gaming, a little more for video editing and mostly mundane stuff. Current system uses a 80GB drive with external back-up and haven't used 50% of the drive yet (though not much video stuff yet).

Drive speed is nice but not willing to pay tons for it. Have seen a lot of people use RAID 0 for OS but RAID 0 makes me nervous given a recent HD failure with no warning on my wife's computer. I like RAID 1 for its back-up and little faster read speed (though longer write speed), though have seen threads warning about viruses wiping that security away and still needing routine back-ups.

So my questions are:
1. Any RAID set-up recommendations, and what do you recommend putting on each drive.
2. HD recommendations...I know Raptors are fast but are a little noisier and more $ per GB. Saw a recent review that SATA 2 drives are not horribly behind Raptors and have been eyeing the Seagate 160GB or 300GB SATA 2 drive (about same price as Raptor 74)....but open to any ideas. HD decision is my last one before building my system. Thanks in advance to all that respond.
 
I've heard a lot of mixed opinions on RAID. Some people say it's great, and some say it's not worth the money. I would say that that the majority of people would say to use RAID 0 with 2 80GB hard drives.

On a side note, I just purchased a 36GB Raptor and it's very silent. It could be due to my 4 case fans and large heatsink/fan.
 
sickness said:
On a side note, I just purchased a 36GB Raptor and it's very silent. It could be due to my 4 case fans and large heatsink/fan.

How do case fans make your hd silent? Do you mean you cant hear your hd noise over the case fans?

Rachner how much hd space do you think you will need in total?
 
I bought 2 Seagate 160gb 7200rpm hard drives for 120 shipped planning on putting them in a RAID 0 array...but couldn't get the nvidia raid drivers to load....got fed up and said screw it.

Stuff still loads pretty quickly...
 
Thanks everyone for the help.

Jam...I think I've decide after all the research and the fact I got a great deal on 2 250gb WD 16MB Sata 2 drives to go with this:

74GB Raptor for OS and programs and 2 250GB drives in RAID 1 for security purposes for swap and data and for extra backup of the Raptor. Will also do once a week backups of the RAID...what do you think?
 
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