Upgrading my HDD

[swat565]

Looking into upgrading my HDD and needed some guidance. I'm looking for speed much more thank quantity. I was thinking of the Solid State Drives but high price to very small storage space is a turnoff. what HDD would you guys recommend, my system is as followed (just in case its needed)

e8400
2x1gb corsair dominator 1066mhz ram
evga 750i FTW mobo
8800gt

 

[aevm]

Velociraptor - max performance, 300GB, $300. There's also a smaller Velociraptor.

If these are too expensive for your taste, look at the WD 640GB and the Seagate 640GB. Some 1TB drives are as fast as these two, but cost a lot more per GB.

 

[englandr753]

If you dont do the velociraptor then go for the other drives mentioned above and go raid. Striping will allow you to burn the data to both hard drives at the same time requiring half the access read/write time. But you will want a backup because if one of those drives go bad you are screwed.

What exactly are you doing that requres faster hard drives?

 

[swat565]

@ englandr- gaming mainly, just looking to get fast load times ect
@ aevm- 150gb velociraptor looks like it might be good, doubt il use more that 150gb and i can always have my 300gb for music and downloads.

 

[englandr753]

I think you would get better gaming performance by getting an imaging software that allows you to mount an ISO image of your game disk to a virtual drive on your pc.

You will have an icon on your "my computer" menu that will look like another cd rom with the name of the game that it represents. Doing this allows you to omit the slower cd/dvd access times and use the much faster hard drive for running your gaming software.

This should be faster than using a faster hard drive and still using your dvd/cd rom to read the disk data.

Alcohol 120 is good but is for Windows XP (unless theres an update I dont know about). There may be other programs but someone else will have to list them for you since Im about to pass out from being up waaay toooo late...

 

[aevm]

That's a good idea, and it also means you won't scratch the cd/dvd. But won't the copy protections interfere? Sometimes I think they're intentionally added so that we have to insert the CD every day and eventually scratch it and have to buy the game again and again