How can you guys recommend that he use either scsi or raptor if you don't even know what he is doing with it
Further more.. Having a "fast ass" hard drive isnt going to improve your machine any. As long as you have a c: with 8mb cache @ 7200rpm you'll be fine.
There is a common misconception that having scsi or raptor drives somehow makes your computer "better". The only thing it does (unless you're doing audio or video editing, maybe 1 or 2 other things) is allow more throughput and it only shows more throughput if you're using them in raid 0.
Example:
you have 3 systems
1 with 2x 10k scsi, 1 with 2x 10k raptor, 1 with 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache
Goal: open a 200mb program
system 1)
scsi drives in raid 0 should pull something like 110-120mb/s .. your program will load in 2 seconds
system 2)
raptors in raid 0 should pull something like 90-100mb/s.. your program will load in 2 seconds
system 3)
80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache will pull 50mb/s (remember this is 1 drive, not 2) so your program will load in 4 secs.
Ok, so what are the pluses and minuses of running with 80gb 7200rpm as opposed to the raptor or scsi solution?
1) scsi and raptor have a 50% higher probability of failing (because you have an additional drive)
2) As you notice, you're talking about a difference of 2 seconds which you arent even going to really be able to notice anyway.
3) Once the program loads its in memory, no more harddrive read-writes..
so.. in order to get a faster load (by 2 seconds) you end up getting a 50% higher rate of fail, and spend 4x as much as you would for an 80gb 7200rpm 8mb cache (like 60$ @ newegg).
Ok, so now lets talk about raid a little more in depth.
So you decided, what the hell ill get it anyway.
1) There are nice little quirks with installing your OS onto a raid.. If you EVER decide to update your controller's driver in windows you can expect windows to lock up and never boot again.
2) The only useful version of raid is striping for performance reasons.
3) Raid 1 is some poop. You end up having an identical drive which is running all the time, sure its cloning your data.. But what you may or may not realize is that both hard drives are going to have the same life expectancy. So when one goes, theres a good chance that the other will go with it..
4) With raid 1, and/or 10 .. if 1 of your drives dies theres a good chance that it still wont be able to recover.
So, we have that cleared up now
raid 1, raid 10, raid 5, etc, etc ... are really not useful in any kind of pratical situation.. So what you really want is a single hard drive (for your os) and maybe 2 drives in raid 0 as a d: drive for alternate storage. Then you can make a ghost or acronis image of your C drive, store it on d drive (maybe like once a week/month, you can also burn the image onto dvd/cd so you can recover from that).. So if your c drive ever dies (which is the most used drive) you can recover everything (minus a week or so worth of data loss) within a few minutes.
Theres more i could say, but my lunch break is over and i gotta get back to work.
edit: what is your reasoning behind getting scsi/raptor? What are you planning on doing with your system?