Not sure about my storage configuration

[bdwain]

hi,
i'm oging to be putting together an i7 machine in the next few weeks, and after doing some reading, i am no longer sure about what hard drive configuration would work best for me.

for reference, i'll be getting the i7 920, asus p6t mobo, 6gb of ddr3 memory, a radeon 4870 1gb, either the antec truepower 750 w psu or the corsair 850tx, and windows 7. my main focus will be playing games and programming. i usually have a virtual machine running and a lot of stuff in general, so multitasking peformance is important. i might get into photo and video editing later, but idk.

origianlly i just planned to do 2 caviar black 640 gb drives raid 0'ed togehter.
but i've heard that the problems with that are that its bad to put your system drive on raid 0 and that the performance boost of raid 0 isnt that big. (if raid 1 would also boost performance alot, i'd prob be fine with just 640 gb, i'm not sure i'd use all of that anyway. i was going with 2 drives more for performance increase than space increase.) caviar black 640 gb's cost around $70 usd.

it was also suggested that i get a velociraptor drive to put just windows on and have that separate from my raid 0 thing, but that's getting to be too much $. i suppose i could also get just one, but i'm not sure how much i could fit on the velociraptor drive and accessing the stuff on the other one might be a bit slow. 150 gb velociraptor is $160. 74gb is $70

although, if i did that, i could also get like a 32 gb ssd to use as the windows drive instead, which would save 60 dollars and prob be faster, but still be slow to access anything other than windows stuff. is 32 gb big enoguh for windows 7? i don't think i'd want to risk 16 gb. 32 gig ssd's are in the realm of $100, plus or minus a little.

I am most concerned with minimizing boot time, but i also want all other disk accesses to be above average as well. I'd also like to have it somewhat quiet, so no 15000 rpm drives. I don't think i can go much over $200 for storage. does anyone have any suggestions on which route i should go?

thanks

 

[sminlal]

If you don't need to install too much software on whatever SSD you can afford for the OS, then it will beat the pants off any hard drive for boot times and program loading. For most people the OS disk is the primary bottleneck and having data files on a separate hard drive is not a problem.

But if you're manipulating large data files (video editing, for example) then you might want to put more of your money into the data disk instead.

 

[bdwain]

But can I install programs on thr other disk also, and just reserve the ssd for the os and anything it does on it's own, like windows updates or w/e. And something like firefox or a game would go on thr hdd data disk. How would that perform? Would it boot fast but then be slow to load all of those programs?

 

[sminlal]

You can certainly install applications on the data disk, although some programs are a little finicky about this. They would be slower to load than from the SSD, but not as slow as if the OS was on a hard drive. This is because when an application starts it needs to load and access files not only from the application directories but also from the system directories as well.