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HD upgrade (System/Data/Backup)

Last response: in Storage
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Hi Guys,

I want to upgrade (or rationalise) my current HD solution which is a WD Caviar Black 500GB drive used for system/apps and some data and a 1TB WD Green for excess data but mostly backup. Currently thats about 60% full but not performing the best (slow).

The upgrade is mostly to have a better storage plan, but also to increase performance.

I run:
i7 950- OC'ed to 4.1GHZ
6Gb of Kingston HyperX 2000
Sapphire HD5850 Vapor-X
Asus P6X58D-E
W7 64bit

PC is used for many things (home media centre/some online gaming/AutoCAD + ArchiCAD BIM modelling and Video editting - Cyberlink PowerDirector) so I deal with large files alot and software that has moderate HD access requirements.

Budget is about $500-700US - am happy to reuse my current drives if they could be utilised within the solution, but probably only for backup?

I'm thinking 1 solution might be:

SSD approx 128Gb for system/app's alone (or maybe a fast HD like WD VELOCI-RAPTOR 150GB 10000RPM-SATA-16MB?)
750-1Tb drive for data (type unknown??), possibly in RAID for higher access speed?
2TB drive for backup

Does this sound like a plan or are there other options?

Even any advice on best brands etc for storage type greatly apprec.

Cheers guys,
Daz

More about : upgrade system data backup

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Storage Expert

Sounds like my system. I have two boot drives - one is SSD 128 GB and the other is a 150 GB Velociraptor, plus a 750 GB Seagate data drive. So it sounds like a plan to me.

Instead of one external drive for backups, I seem to have accumulated nine. These all attach directly to the SATA bus, so they are fast when I do backups.

If you have process large files, two drives in RAID0 will improve the speed, but RAID0 is more prone to failure than a single drive and should be backed up frequently. You should have two sets of backup media and alternate them, so that if the system dies in the middle of a backup you still have a valid set.

Finally, the Caviar Green drives are slow. They are meant to be, as a tradeoff for lower power usage. Trade all the way up to Caviar Blacks, or find a few thousand dollars and get a 500 GB SSD drive.

Good luck

Edit: as far as drive brands go, I am agnostic. I personally use mainly Seagate drives, but that's because Seagate was the first that I heard of, many years ago, that focused on making drives quiet. Trust your drives but do backups anyway.
Storage Expert

darreng101 said:
Roughly speaking, how do you find the speed of the Velociraptor vs the SSD?

I can't compare how they feel - the SSD has a recent install of Win7, the Velociraptor has an aging copy of XP that is crapped up with years of installs, uninstalls, driver updates, programs that cache pieces at startup, and otherwise things that make it slow down. So the SSD starts and runs things faster, but the XP used to be more nimble than it is now (kind of like me).
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