Help with new hard drives

[rav3n]

Yo all, im replacing my 2 640gig hdd as they both failed 🙁 (the second one failed about a day after the first) So now i want to get 8 new hard drives. I was thinking of getting 2 80gig ones and run them in raid and ahave windows/programs etc on them to increase speed abit. I also then want to get 6 1tb or 2tb drives for games/movies/music/recorded tv etc. Anyone got any ideas about whether i should go with this setup and what hard drives should i be looking to get. Im in australia so it would be cool if any1 who replys could find links to australian stores not ones in the u.s but any help/ideas would be appreciated

 

[rav3n]

Wow no body can offer any advice thats bad🙁...

 

[sub mesa]

80GB disks are slow, if you want speed; pick fast HDDs or go for an SSD. Two older generation HDDs in RAID0 will not speed things up.

Also, if multiple HDDs fail in succession, a common cause like physical trauma or power fluctuations are a likely cause. No RAID can protect against these. Create backups instead in another physical machine!

 

[rav3n]

huh 80gig hdds?...omg sorry i meant to put 500gb 7200rpm drives in the original post not 80gb. I keep a backup image of my os with all the drivers and what not already installed on my home server so if the raid array fails and i lose data it wont be a big deal, it will just piss me off.

 

[sub mesa]

Ah ok. Well, you still would be better off with an SSD (or RAID0 of SSDs) as system disk paired with those 6x 1TB disks for storage, if your budget allows it. The SSDs you should look for are OCZ Vertex and Intel X25-M 80GB, these are very fast SSDs that are reasonably priced and are worth spending on IMO if budget allows. It will speedup your system more than a CPU upgrade and make a more fluent experience possible.

You should probably pick the 5400rpm WD Green ones, since they are cheap, offer excellent sequential speeds for large file transfers, and only consume half the power of normal disks, making cooling less of a problem. They are ideal drives to use for storage of data or "download disks". But less suitable as system disk running your operating system and applications. SSDs excell on those.

 

[rav3n]

ok cheers for the input