What hard drive to get?

[JackHarmon]

I currently have an 80gb 8MB cache WD ata100 drive, but want much faster speeds. My Soundblaster Audigy Gamer has a firewire port, but I'm not opposed to buying a USB 2.0 interface card.

Should I get a firewire drive or USB 2.0? Would I get near max USB 2.0 speed if I were to convert my WD 8MB cache drive to USB 2.0 using a converter kit?

Any suggestions? The application is for Asheron's Call 2, a game which constantly hits the disk to load textures in the area as you travel. I tried 160MB SCSI, but it wasn't THAT much quicker than my ATA100 8MB cache disk.

Thanks!

 

[Oracle]

You'd never achieve a USB2-like performance. You are limited by the drive, not the interface.
Best option is to setup a RAID 0 system with another WD w/8Mb. Or else a RAID 0 using four drives (don't know if that can be done though, but I imagine it could), but that's costly.


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<font color=blue>Now I'm broke!</font color=blue>

 

[icy_oblivion]

You will definately get best preformance if you switch to a RAID set up. The other option, that sees some improvement is to partition the exisiting HD and have the first partition being small and only for the OS. Since it is the first partition on the disk it will have the fastest access times to all the OS data.

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