Hard Drive Choice Help

[roblaw42]

Hi
I was going to get 2xSAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" and put them in a RAID configuration. This has since gone out of stock on newegg.
What is a good alternative/equivalent to this hard drive?

 

[lp231]

You're other choices are WD, Seagate, and Hitachi.
My personal preference will be WD.

 

[geofelt]

From a reliability point of view, read this:
http://www.behardware.com/articles/831-6/components-returns-rates.html

What do you hope to accomplish with raid?

Raid-0 has been touted as a performance enhancer.
Sequential benchmarks do look wonderful, but the real world does not seem to deliver the indicated performance benefits for most
desktop users. The reason is, that sequential benchmarks are coded for maximum overlapped I/O rates. It depends on reading a stripe of data simultaneously from each raid-0 member, and that is rarely what we do.
The OS does mostly small reads and writes, so raid-0 is of little use there.

The value of raid-1 and it's variants like raid-5 is that you can recover from a drive failure quickly. It is for servers that can not tolerate any interruption.
Modern hard drives have a advertised mean time to failure on the order of 500,000+ hours. That is something like 50 years.
With raid-1 you are protecting yourself from specifically a hard drive failure. Not from other failures such as viruses, operator error,
malware, fire, theft, etc.
For that, you need external backup. If you have external backup, you do not need raid-1

 

[roblaw42]

I will be using CAD and gaming extensively so I am going for speed and it is a good backp for hardware failure, no matter how unlikely.

 

[roblaw42]

Best answer selected by roblaw42.