Should I run raid or secondary hd only?

[ms5555]

I'm running out of space on my hd. I have a 500gb momentus xt. I was thinking I'll grab a 1tb samsung spinpoint f3 for $85 off newegg, but I noticed the 500gb momentus xt is on sale for $80. I don't need a ton more space, 500gb more should be plenty for a while. I don't know much about raid setups and installing games in a raid setup vs installing games to a secondary hard drive. In raid do both drives act as the same drive letter? I don't even know if the momentus xt works well in raid or not. I was kind of thinking I'd just pop a second drive in there and install some games to it. I run a lot of steam games but there is a workaround in steam beta to get games to install to multiple drive letters now.

Also I run an oem copy of windows 7 so anything I do has to not mess up that activation. If I switch to raid will I need to re-install windows? I think it would work anyway since only one hardware piece is changing and I don't think that's enough to invalidate the license.

 

[avs262]

"I don't know much about raid setups and installing games in a raid setup vs installing games to a secondary hard drive. In raid do both drives act as the same drive letter?"
>> Yes, to the OS it's a single device.

"If I switch to raid will I need to re-install windows?"
>> Yes, the controller will have to initialize the drives, which will destroy the existing data.

I usually use a single SSD, or 2 SSD's in a RAID 1 for my OS, and setup 2 SSD's in RAID 0 for games. RAID 0 offers no redundancy (who cares, games can be re-installed), but reads/writes are much faster.

 

[ms5555]

For games, what's the advantage to running in raid setup vs running a game off a secondary hd? Is it faster?

 

[dingo07]

forget RAID and stick with simply adding another drive for data

 

[ms5555]

That's what I was thinking too. Would you recomend the extra space or the faster drive? I know having the os on a hybrid drive helps the boot up a lot, helps my often used programs like chrome open quickly. Not sure if the hybrid on the secondary will be a huge benefit over a normal 7200 rpm drive.

 

[dingo07]

extra space - you likely won't notice the speed difference unless its an SSD