Couple questions about 10,000RPM, RAID, and Windows x64...

[garrettmania]

Hi there!
I have a few questions about upgrading my machine, I know some of these questions have to do with other forum sections, BUT the majority of my questions belong here. So here goes...
1) I'm conidering buying one or two(depending on the next qurestion) 150GB WD Velociraptor hard drives (10,000 RPM), worth it or not?
2) Would it be worth it for me to use RAID 0 with two of those?
3) How big of a boost would I see versus my current WD SE16 3200AAKS 320GB 7200RPM HDD. (benchmark numbers mean nothing to me, I don't understand them, approximate load times would be fine )
4) Ok, so I have gotten either single Veloci, RAID Veloci, stuck with my current drive, or did something different. Would it be worth it to get Windows Vista x64 (or wait until Win7 x64)?
5) I currently have 4 GB of DDR2 800 g.skill ram (2 slots). Would it be worth it to buy the same RAM to fill the other two to give me 8GB (wow, couple years ago I thought 1GB was a lot!)
6) If I upgrade, should I use the 320 I have for back up or file storeage and leave the upgrades for the OS and apps only?

Alright, I THINK that's all my questions for now.

My Specs:
-Intel e8400 @ 3GHz (thinking about OCing)
-Asus P5Q Deluxe Mobo Intel p45
-4 GB DDR2 800 g.skill RAM / 2 slots
-ATI Radeon HD 4870
-Western Digital SE16 3200AAKS 320GB 7200RPM HDD
-PC Power and Cooling 610W PSU
-Antec 1200 case
-Sony IDE DVD ROM

Thanks! I hope this isn't too inappropriate for this board...
Garrett

 

[antiacid]

the 150gig raptors are based on an older technology. The newer 300gig velociraptor are faster and end up costing the same as 2x 150 or equivalent. Also, you might consider a wd 640gig black (the 32mb buffer ones) that are only marginally slower than the 300gig VR but gives faster seek time. You'd have more storage size for less money and slightly less performance. For your current machine, this is mostly what I would recommend.

Keep your 4gig of rams, you won't notice a difference if you get more for general gaming/productivity use.

Going vista instead of XP is mostly just cosmetic changes. Some people enjoy it, some don't. I run Vista atm but disabled the UAC nagging screen and it performs just fine for me.

Finally, I'd get an external enclosure for 20-30$ and use that 320gig as an external backup of my important stuff.

 

[geofelt]

There is generally no real world(vs. synthetic transfer rate benchmarks) performance advantage to raid of any kind.
Go to www.storagereview.com at this link: http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=SingleDriveVsRaid0
There are some specific applications that will benefit, but
gaming is not one of them. Even if you have an application which reads one input file sequentially, and writes
it out, you will perform about as well by putting the input on one drive, and the output on the other.

I think the velociraptors are wonderful. They do make a difference, everything seems snappier. They come in both 150gb and 300gb versions. The larger size is better because you get more data under the faster outer rings. That is not a big factor, though, just get the size you need

If I had to pick a number, I would guess about a 10%-20% difference in load times.
Win7 has some good early reviews, but I find vista-64 to be very good. It would at least let you use all 4gb.
Adding 4gb is a cheap upgrade. Vista superfetch will use lots of that ram to cache your most frequently used modules. One downside is that two more ram sticks may reduce your overclocking capabilities. With a single vga card, your E8400 @3.0 should be sufficient to drive it to the max.

I think I would just clone your wd-320gb-aaks to a 300gb velociraptor, and use the old drive in an external enclosure for backup. That is what I did.