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[Hzza]

So, at the moment I have 2 independant HDD's; both 250gig, one with "system" stuff on it (Windows, FF, Mumble, all that crap) and one that I use exclusivly for my media (Steam, other games and iTunes mainly). The "system" drive (henceforth known by his actual name, Steven) is only about half full, but the media drive I've completely filled up, to the point that my iTunes folder is now sitting in Steven until I sort out a new system. Which is what I need to talk to you fine gents about. The endgame being that I have all my games and music installed on the one big ass drive and all the system shite on a seperate smaller drive and never the twain shall meet (or clog up each other), meaning faster boot times, and faster loading times in game (I guess, right?).

I've got my 1TB external back up drive up and running, and I'm thinking of getting a 1TB internal as well to replace the media drive so that I can actually use it as I intended . Thing is, I don't know what should I do with my 2x250gigs? I was thinking sticking both of them in Raid1 and having both replace Steven as my "system" drive, but then had a moment of inspiration...

Alternativly, I could flog them and put the money towards a cheap 40/50gig SataII SSD and use it exclusivly as a OS drive and move all the non-system shite onto a partition on the TB drive.

I get my bonus at the end of July and don't really want to blow more then £200 odd on this set up; I've spec'd a WD TB drive at around £70-£80 and a 40gig SSD at around £100 and as well as advice about what to do with the 2 250's I want advice about SSD's, I had a quick look around in the SSD thread elsewhere in the forums but that seemed to be more about the performance differences rather then what brand r gud. I heard Samsung are the balls at SSD, but again, I'm not exactly clued up.

Alot of this won't make any sence as I'm typing it out as I think of it, inbetween pulling stupid reports at work, but I think the gist of what I'm after is relativly clear. I'll add a tl;dr anyway though .

tl;dr - 2 250gig HDD's: do I RAID1 them or sell/replace them with an SSD ---> wat r gud SSD brands.

edit - Wrong RAID type

[r007]

What are you trying to gain by a RAID1 of two old drives? Surely not the redundancy?
If you're in for the performance, then you'll probably be better off with the SSD. You can gain redundancy by periodically making hot-images off Shadow Copies of the SSD (w/ http://www.runtime.org/driveimage-xml.htm)... It's not like your TB drive won't comfortably keep a few.

Remeber though that with current Windowses (Vista onward) the OS Partition tends to fill up with all the crap in \windows\winsxs... Depending on how often you are in for a reinstall, it might not matter though.

If you have doubts about SSD long-term stability (like I did), I've seen estimates that overwriting the SSD continually at 100% write speed will take some 8 years for the first sector to reach its MTBF. That should be well enough.   

[Hzza]

Yeah, the RAID1 was partly a reliability thing and partly because I don't have any need whatsoever for 2 seperate 250gig drives AND a TB drive and as its going to be the OS drive (as it were) the added reliability was what I was after.

Do you not think its worth RAIDing then? I'm basically up for a bit of experimenting and as I've got the 2 drives and a knowledge of how to set them up thought it might be worth a bash.

[Tommy the Cat]

Why did you not just put your iTunes on the external and problem solved? Alternatively, blow on it.

also:

[Millicent Bystander]

From my experience if you are RAIDing 2 HDD they have to be identical models or you'll get problems.

I'd also recommend the Western Digital Caviar Blue series of Hard Drives

[CruelCow]

I hereby petition Hzza to create more threads

[Zarf]

Alternativly, I could flog them and put the money towards a cheap 40/50gig SataII SSD and use it exclusivly as a OS drive and move all the non-system shite onto a partition on the TB drive.

I get my bonus at the end of July and don't really want to blow more then £200 odd on this set up; I've spec'd a WD TB drive at around £70-£80 and a 40gig SSD at around £100 and as well as advice about what to do with the 2 250's I want advice about SSD's, I had a quick look around in the SSD thread elsewhere in the forums but that seemed to be more about the performance differences rather then what brand r gud. I heard Samsung are the balls at SSD, but again, I'm not exactly clued up.

How much time do you spend on the desktop? If your PC is purely a gaming beast I'd just get a couple of modern 500GB single platter drives in RAID0 for your system/apps/games and a 1TB drive for backups/other synced with your external 1TB. I'd probably go for two Samsung F3's @£40ea and a £60 Samsung Ecogreen 1TB or WD Green.

If you spend much time on the desktop with a multitude of things open, you really can't beat an SSD. I'm addicted to the speed now, got two in my gaming comp, one in my laptop and i put one of the 40GB drives you're looking at in my HTPC (Last year you could get them for £70 :p).
For me the difference felt like when I went from an AthlonXP to a Core2Duo years ago. On a clean install the difference isn't that special, but even now that I have a ton of different services on autostart and a notification bar that stretches across half my 24" screen my comp is still booting in around 20 seconds from the windows logo - On a mechanical drive I'd be looking at around 2-3 minutes.  Everything stays smooth no matter what's going on, I never feel like my comp is getting "bogged down" or in need of a format/reinstall any more.

If you go the SSD route I'd get One of These Best value for money by a country mile atm. Gives you enough room to put two or three games on as well as your OS and Apps. You can do some clever things with symlinks so you can have your main Steam folder on your mechanical drive but put individual games on the SSD.  One of these + a 1TB Ecogreen drive for your media and system drive backups synced to to external drive will only run you about £20 more than the mechanical drive setup, and is still £40 under budget.
This would be my preferred option, much quicker than RAID0 HDD's in windows, a bit quicker on game loads, Quieter and more reliable. Downside is it's a bit more hassle to make best use of the space so if all you do is game the Raid0 mechanical drives is the easier option.

[Hzza]

Why did you not just put your iTunes on the external and problem solved?

Did that before and stupid iTunes kept loosing the path to the external and it was just ballache remapping it all the time. Besides, the external is for backup, not day to day. Also, I can't see your picture so I'm going to assume its either another stupid "haters gon' hate" thing or a lolcat and call you a twat anyway .

@Milli, yeah both drives are the same, origonally had them in RAID1 which failed, hence the 2 seperate drives and they're both WD Caviar Blue, the same as the TB I'm going to be getting .

@Cruel, I hearby petition you to suck my ass . I'd rather spend the time asking you dickbags lovely chaps for advice then blow £150 on useless tech .

@Zarf, its mainly a gaming rig, but as I have almost no tech knowledge, I'm using it to dick around with and teach myself a bit about hardware. I've already had a RAID0 fail on me which was a learning experience and now wanted to have a go with RAID1/SSD's.

I think I'll order the TB and decide where to go when that arives as I can't do anything without it anyway!

I've got to say, I am interested in the whole SSD thing, but at the same time want to see how the RAID works out so I guess I'll probably end up doing both!

[Zarf]

Why did you not just put your iTunes on the external and problem solved?

Did that before and stupid iTunes kept loosing the path to the external and it was just ballache remapping it all the time. Besides, the external is for backup, not day to day. Also, I can't see your picture so I'm going to assume its either another stupid "haters gon' hate" thing or a lolcat and call you a twat anyway .

@Milli, yeah both drives are the same, origonally had them in RAID1 which failed, hence the 2 seperate drives and they're both WD Caviar Blue, the same as the TB I'm going to be getting .

@Cruel, I hearby petition you to suck my ass . I'd rather spend the time asking you dickbags lovely chaps for advice then blow £150 on useless tech .

@Zarf, its mainly a gaming rig, but as I have almost no tech knowledge, I'm using it to dick around with and teach myself a bit about hardware. I've already had a RAID0 fail on me which was a learning experience and now wanted to have a go with RAID1/SSD's.

I think I'll order the TB and decide where to go when that arives as I can't do anything without it anyway!

I've got to say, I am interested in the whole SSD thing, but at the same time want to see how the RAID works out so I guess I'll probably end up doing both!

I think you'll be pretty underwhelmed by RAID1. It's about 30 seconds to setup and once done you don't need to think about it any more.
From a technical perspective it's a lot safer to backup your system drive to the internal 1TB drive, and have a regularly scheduled sync from there to the external drive. If you have a power surge/PSU fuckup / Motherboard RAID controller fuckup it's quite possible to lose all the drives in your array.
RAID1 won't help you if you get corruption either, since all changes are written to both drives simultaneously. Same goes for any accidental deletions / formats / viruses.

It's low maintenance and better than nothing, but remember it's only a partial redundancy rather than a true backup.

[Hzza]

I think you'll be pretty underwhelmed by RAID1. It's about 30 seconds to setup and once done you don't need to think about it any more.
From a technical perspective it's a lot safer to backup your system drive to the internal 1TB drive, and have a regularly scheduled sync from there to the external drive. If you have a power surge/PSU fuckup / Motherboard RAID controller fuckup it's quite possible to lose all the drives in your array.
RAID1 won't help you if you get corruption either, since all changes are written to both drives simultaneously. Same goes for any accidental deletions / formats / viruses.

Well, it wasn't so much the setup, more as the ongoing maintenance, but if you're saying that there isn't any then I don't think I'll bother. I've already got a pretty tight backup schedule after my last RAIDfail, and even then the only thing I'm really backing up is my iTunes library and game saves so none of it is life changing shit. I guess I'll live a month of RAID0 if not just to satisfy my curiosity then to spread the cost of 2 new HDDs over 2 paychecks .

[r007]

I'd just get a couple of modern 500GB single platter drives in RAID0

No, no, no, no, NO!
No RAID0 unless you really really don't care about losing your data.

You ONLY EVER EVER start thinking about RAID0 when you have 4 Drives, so you can setup a Stripe on top of a Mirror.

[Hzza]

Burned by that before, wasn't even remotely considering it again .

Stupid Chaos...

[Zarf]

I'd just get a couple of modern 500GB single platter drives in RAID0

No, no, no, no, NO!
No RAID0 unless you really really don't care about losing your data.

You ONLY EVER EVER start thinking about RAID0 when you have 4 Drives, so you can setup a Stripe on top of a Mirror.

and a 1TB drive for backups/other synced with your external 1TB.

If you'd read my post properly you'd see that not only is the system array intended to be backed up to the internal 1TB drive, but that 1TB drive is itself backed up to an external drive.

As long as you have a clear schedule to manage the backups this is a much better solution than RAID10 for the reasons mentioned in another of my posts above.

Enterprise methods aren't always the ideal choice for a home environment, there are different risks and requirements which need to be recognised.

[Junta]

I'd just get a couple of modern 500GB single platter drives in RAID0

No, no, no, no, NO!
No RAID0 unless you really really don't care about losing your data.

You ONLY EVER EVER start thinking about RAID0 when you have 4 Drives, so you can setup a Stripe on top of a Mirror.

I agree with R007 (+1)

RAID for home use is both risky and questionable. I don't see the performance being a massive boost either.

If you have to use RAID, then the only point for me would be mirroring. Anything else is a risk, one that gets bigger with more hard drives in the array.

[r007]

If you'd read my post properly you'd see that not only is the system array intended to be backed up to the internal 1TB drive, but that 1TB drive is itself backed up to an external drive.

Sorry, I didn't mean to bash your plan too much, it's just that I have a personal hatred campaign against RAID0 in the home environment and that tends to get the better of me. I shall buy you a beer as reparation.

Enterprise methods aren't always the ideal choice for a home environment, there are different risks and requirements which need to be recognised.

This. (Quoted for truth, +1.)