I installed win7, and in the process realized my disk is a bit slow, and that I'd really like to speed up the texture loading in wow, and OS load speed. I don't need a large amount of storage, what I'm looking at is making a smaller amount of storage pretty fast.
Hardware: GA-EP45-UD3R using the ICH10 sata controller
Choice 1: 2x 500gb disks
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM is on newegg for 64.99. Use 2 of them in a raid 0 configuration. This would yeild 1TB of storage and the drives are supposidly fast and hopefully don't have the issues of the 7200.11 series
Choice 2: 4x 80gb disks
Newegg has a couple of 80gb drives at the 34.99 price:
Western Digital Caviar Blue WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
Western Digital Caviar SE WD800AAJS 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
The idea would be to take 4 of them and create a raid0 array from them. The disks are older and with only a 8mb cache, but it would be many more spindles to fetch data from. The downside I can see is that it leaves 4 points of failure
Choice 3: Cheap 64Gb SSD
Use a 64Gb SSD, say the G.SKILL FM-25S2S-64GB 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail without any raid configuration. Its on newegg for 134.99. It has a read speed of 155MB/s
As the goal would be to improve windows boot speed, and loading in wow etc, of these options, all of which are in the $130 range, which would people recommend?
Hardware: GA-EP45-UD3R using the ICH10 sata controller
Choice 1: 2x 500gb disks
The Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 ST3500410AS 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM is on newegg for 64.99. Use 2 of them in a raid 0 configuration. This would yeild 1TB of storage and the drives are supposidly fast and hopefully don't have the issues of the 7200.11 series
Choice 2: 4x 80gb disks
Newegg has a couple of 80gb drives at the 34.99 price:
Western Digital Caviar Blue WD800JD 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
Western Digital Caviar SE WD800AAJS 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST380815AS 80GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
The idea would be to take 4 of them and create a raid0 array from them. The disks are older and with only a 8mb cache, but it would be many more spindles to fetch data from. The downside I can see is that it leaves 4 points of failure
Choice 3: Cheap 64Gb SSD
Use a 64Gb SSD, say the G.SKILL FM-25S2S-64GB 2.5" 64GB SATA II Internal Solid state disk (SSD) - Retail without any raid configuration. Its on newegg for 134.99. It has a read speed of 155MB/s
As the goal would be to improve windows boot speed, and loading in wow etc, of these options, all of which are in the $130 range, which would people recommend?