Should i Raid 0? SSD? Velociraptor?

This One Time

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I believe i need to upgrade my harddrive to speed up my computer. With my two 1TB WD green drives i have plenty of storage but i fear my 500mb WD blue drive which i have all software installed on may be slowing me down.

I plan on upgrading to SandyBridge 2600k later this year or early next year.

I have never used Raid 0 or SSD or a Velociraptor. So im not really sure what i should buy.


Newegg is selling my current blue drive for only $39.99 which i could put into a Raid 0 and see a significant performance boost for cheap?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136073&cm_re=WD5000AAKS-_-22-136-073-_-Product

OR

Newegg is selling a 1TB WD Black for $79.99 with coupon perhaps this is a better than 2 older blues in Raid 0? Maybe I should buy two of these and put them in Raid 0?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136533


and of course their is many other options which you guys know better than me. What should I buy?


My computers primary use is gaming(wide variety of games) and watching movies from ISO files.


Current Build

CPU
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Processor BX80557E6600
ZEROtherm CF900 92mm CPU Cooler

Mother Board
ASUS P5B Deluxe LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard

RAM
OCZ Platinum Revision 2 4GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model OCZ2P800R22GK

Graphics Card
EVGA 01G-P3-1371-AR GeForce GTX 460 (Fermi) FPB EE 1GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

Case
APEVIA X-Infinity ATXB6KLW-BK/420 Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case

Power Supply
Antec NeoPower 550 550W ATX12V SLI Certified CrossFire Ready Active PFC Power Supply

Hard Drives
1 x Western Digital Caviar Blue WD5000AAKS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
2 x Western Digital Caviar Green WD10EADS 1TB SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive
 
Your WD Blue AAKS drives are fairly decent.
b81.png


What kind of performance 'speed up' where you hoping for?
It would be a shame to go through all the work of setting up RAID and reinstalling the OS and programs just find the system is still at the 'same speed'.
 

This One Time

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Reinstalling the OS and programs is no problem. Their is little on my computer, because last week i installed Windows 7 64 bit over my old windows XP 32 bit.

however I dont want to go out spending money for somthing that wont make a difference. What kind of difference can i expect from upgrading my current drive to a black or setting it up in a raid?
 

subasteve5800

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You probably wouldn't even notice if you upgraded from a blue to a black. A RAID 0 would give you a more noticeable performance boost when you are transferring files but an SSD is really where it's at for a boot drive. SSDs just blow HDDs out of the water and as far as opening and closing programs go, SSDs offer the best performance short of a RAM disk.

Intel, OCZ, and Crucial all make excellent SSDs. Expensive tho...
 
Can you explain how you did that?
As far as I know it's not possible. Unless you mean you did a clean install of Win7 64 that completely replaced WinXP and required all programs to be installed?
Going from Blue to Black you probably won't notice the difference (unless you use a stop watch). It won't 'feel' faster.

RAID is an option and you'd probably notice things like faster Win7 boot times, faster program loading, faster game level loading. It wouldn't be a huge leap in performance, just something you'd notice if you timed it.

I'm still not sure what is slow about your current setup and what you want to be 'faster'.


 

4745454b

Titan
Moderator
AID0 and SSDs will only help when you need info from your drive. For example it will help your game or level load faster, but after everything is loaded into ram the benefits end. Like myself you have an older CPU that is showing its age. I'd replace that CPU before worrying about changing your drives.