View Full Version : Harddrive Question

11-28-08, 01:22 PM
So it seems to me that a while back this hd was the fastest overall out there:

Western Digital Caviar Black WD6401AALS 640GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb

How does it still hold up?

And if this isnt, what is the best hd out?

Im preparing for my next build.

And could someone explain raid a bit for me? What's the best? How do you do it? Benefits? Cons? etc. Thanks a ton in advance!

11-28-08, 02:24 PM
This is the best site out there for learning RAID setups:


I run a RAID0 array, which is basically two identical hard drives paired together as one. This increases speeds dramatically, but also increases the odds of failure two-fold. This isn't an issue for me since I don't have any valuable data on my desktop. Another common RAID config, RAID1, is basically a 1:1 copy. Whatever is written to drive A is also written to drive B. Think of it as a real-time, 1:1 backup. Obviously this does not provide any performance increases. These are most likely the two RAID setups you'd want to run on a desktop. There's RAID5, but that requires at least 3 drives. I run hardware RAID5 on my server.

As for setting it up, if you get a motherboard with an Intel RAID compatible southbridge you'd set this up in a BIOS-like screen. You can also do RAID inside Windows or Linux itself. Both of these are still "software" RAID since you're not using a dedicated RAID processor, like a PCIe card, to do the processing.

11-28-08, 02:28 PM
Thanks for the info, that was just what i needed (at least for the raid part)