hd

thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just one
200G??
do hard drive die much these days??

cupcake wrote:
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just
one 200G??

Get two 100gb en run them raid0 (software or hardware raid)
(Beter: get 2 200gb en run them raid0 ;-))

do hard drive die much these days??

Don't know,.. Not here.

--
Ugh!

Depends what you want to do. 2 x 100 in RAID 0 will give you extra
performance, but double your risk of losing your data. 2 x 100 in RAID 1
will give you half the space, but make it much less likely you will lose
your data. 2 x 100 without RAID will twice the space of the RAID 1, but not
improve the odds that you will lose data.

Personally, I went with a single 200GB drive, with an old 80GB drive for
copying "important" data for backup. It was cheaper than 2 100GB drives at
$150 after rebates (CND$)

Clint.

"Moods" wrote in message
...
cupcake wrote:
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just
one 200G??

Get two 100gb en run them raid0 (software or hardware raid)
(Beter: get 2 200gb en run them raid0 ;-))

do hard drive die much these days??

Don't know,.. Not here.

--
Ugh!

The size and number of hard drives you choose depends on what you consider
important. For use in personal desktop computers, only a fraction of 1 % of
hard drives die before they become laughably obsolete. I have a 3.5 Gbyte
SCSI hard drive that was still working reliably when I took it out of
service. Any IDE hard drive you can buy new today is going to be much
faster, more reliable, and have a much larger capacity. Hard drive failure
usually sends signals before it becomes catastrophic... not only by 'Smart
Drive' electronics, but by reports from regular disk scans.

Though a two drive RAID configuration can be set up to either give faster
through-put or to mirror image the data, a two drive RAID configuration is
four times a likely to fail as a single drive. And do you really want to
mirror your drive? Soft corruption, virus infection, and operator error are
all more likely than a hard failure. In that case, with a mirrored
configuration, you have twice as much corruption. If you don't do regular
back-ups a mirrored configuration will be more likely a problem than a
solution. Mirrored RAID types are for recovery on the fly, with no down
time. That makes sense if the application requires 24/7 availability, and
where strictly maintained backups are part of the operation, but not for
most personal users, where recovery from soft errors, virus infections, and
operator error are more likely... and strictly maintained, daily backups are
kept. What makes more sense for a data security standpoint for a personal
user is to focus on backups, not mirroring. If you don't require the
performance of a striped RAID setup, then get two drives, and use a backup
program to do incremental backups to the second drive. That way, if
corruption of any sort occurs, you can roll back to a time before the
problem. A two drive mirrored system ONLY protects agains hard drive
failure.

Hard drive capacities and speed are increasing much faster than the
CPU/Memory/Motherboard. The first IBM PC with a hard drive had 640 KBytes
memory and a 10 MByte hard drive (and cost $3500.) Today, a good
performance business desktop PC has about 1000 times as much memory and a
hard drive with about 20,000 times as much disk capacity. As for speed,
remember interleaving? The drive electronics were so slow that physically
consecutive sectors could not be read in one rotation! And the interface
was to a 7 MHz ISA Bus! And transfers were ONE byte at a time! So,
whatever you choose in size or speed, you can get twice as much capacity and
twice as much throughput for half the price in two years. I'd suggest going
for a good incremental backup program, maybe even using a NAS before
considering RAID. After all, I assume you overclock.... doesn't that
already raise the risk, however small, of soft failure above the risk of
hard failure? On the other hand, if you have mission critical tasks, then
you aren't overclocking and already have a good backup policy before RAID
even comes into the picture. And keep in mind that recovery from a/ broken
striped RAID is a lot more difficult than recovering from just a broken
single drive file system.

Just guessing from your question, I'd suggest taking care of daily back up
and then going for a striped RAID array if you want the best speed. Get
three drives.... two for striped RAID and one for a daily incremental back
up... with compressed backup all three drives could be the same size. Go
for a size and reputation that fits your budget... with daily backup NO
failure is a disaster. Three 7200 RPM Maxtor, Hitachi, or Western Digital
160 GByte ATA100 or ATA133 drives total between $320 US and $370 US,
depending on brand and reseller.

Also, unless you are doing a LOT of graphics work, or editing video, how
much hard drive capacity do you really need? I have a notebook with a 60
GByte hard drive. It has 1850 music tracks in wma format, but that takes up
only 7 GBytes. The entire drive has over 120,000 files (it includes MS
Visual Studio), but there are still nearly 40 GBytes free!

If you want a good look at the space utilization on your drives, download
'SpaceMonger', free at
http://www.werkema.com/software/spacemonger.html .

--
Phil Weldon, pweldonatmindjumpdotcom
For communication,
replace "at" with the 'at sign'
replace "mindjump" with "mindspring."
replace "dot" with "."

"cupcake" wrote in message
...
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just one
200G??
do hard drive die much these days??

Hi Cupcake s,
I agree with Clint's method. IMHO, RAID 0 won't give the average user a
really significant performance boost. RAID 1 is a decent backup solution
because you don't have to remember to backup g. I have two WD 80G HDs.
XP, my office applications, and essentially everything else except games and
junk stuff is loaded there. The 2nd 80G is my D: drive and all games, sims,
and junk, are loaded there. On the D: drive I have a folder called Backup
and one called Data. About once a week I use Drive Image to create an image
of the C: drive in the D:\Backup folder. I back up stuff like my address
book, Password Safe, and other important data to the Data folder. That
gives me a little redundancy for files that change frequently. This is not a
great backup plan but it works for me. Ideally, I should use Drive Image to
create an image of the C: drive at the end of each day and backup important
data files to a CD/DVD. Buy the two 100G drives. That way you could
experiment with RAID if you choose or use one as a D: drive for backups.
Don't make the mistake of buying the 200G drive and backing up to a
partition there - that's useless but some do it.
--
Tally Ho!
Ed
"Clint" wrote in message
news:tZtYb.541517$X%5.417720@pd7tw2no...
Depends what you want to do. 2 x 100 in RAID 0 will give you extra
performance, but double your risk of losing your data. 2 x 100 in RAID 1
will give you half the space, but make it much less likely you will lose
your data. 2 x 100 without RAID will twice the space of the RAID 1, but
not
improve the odds that you will lose data.

Personally, I went with a single 200GB drive, with an old 80GB drive for
copying "important" data for backup. It was cheaper than 2 100GB drives
at
$150 after rebates (CND$)

Clint.

"Moods" wrote in message
...
cupcake wrote:
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just
one 200G??

Get two 100gb en run them raid0 (software or hardware raid)
(Beter: get 2 200gb en run them raid0 ;-))

do hard drive die much these days??

Don't know,.. Not here.

--
Ugh!

"cupcake" wrote in message
...
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just one
200G??
do hard drive die much these days??

If new hard drives are so good, then why did the manufacturers reduce their
warranty from 3 years down to only 1 year ?
Your power supply would thank you for only using the 200Gb disk and case
cooling is easier with only 1 HDD as the little suckers run pretty hot. My
slave runs at 53 deg C in the summer and I think I read on a HDD site some
time ago that HDDs don`t like 60 C.
Choice is yours but back up your work regularly.

Phil Weldon wrote:
[...]
Hard drive capacities and speed are increasing much faster than the
CPU/Memory/Motherboard. The first IBM PC with a hard drive had 640
KBytes memory and a 10 MByte hard drive (and cost $3500.) Today, a
good performance business desktop PC has about 1000 times as much
memory and a hard drive with about 20,000 times as much disk
capacity. As for speed, remember interleaving? The drive
electronics were so slow that physically consecutive sectors could
not be read in one rotation! And the interface was to a 7 MHz ISA
Bus! And transfers were ONE byte at a time!

Though this has slowed dramatically in the last few years. I have a
3-and-a-half year old, 10 gig drive, which was reasonably good at the time
it was bought. It has off-the-platter speeds of around 28 MBytes/sec. New
top-of-the-line IDE drives are still between 50 and 60 mbytes/sec, so things
have only just doubled in about 42 months. By Moore's law, we should be
should be having drives with speeds of around 140 mbytes/sec off the
platters. Though disk sizes have increased well over what Moore's law would
give. Also, seeks-per-second have only increased about 40% in the same
period.

[...]

--
Michael Brown
www.emboss.co.nz : OOS/RSI software and more
Add michael@ to emboss.co.nz - My inbox is always open

Moore's law does not apply to hard drives. Data density on hard drives is
quadrupling every two years, far outpacing Moore's law (which is more a rule
of thumb than anything quantitative.) And I seriously doubt a 10 Gbyte hard
drive has anywhere near a 28 Mbyte per second sustained throughput... 7
Mbytes per second sustained throughput is more like it. I think what you
are looking at is the burst rate from the on drive cache; 28 Mbytes per
second is near the limit for ATA/33. There just would not be enough
magnetically coded bits per second passing under the heads. Today, a 250
GByte ATA100, 7200 rpm hard drive can be had for less than $200 US (Hitachi
Deskstar 7K250.) It has three platters, and a maximum areal data denstiy of
62 Gbits per square inch and a maximum transfer rate to and from the
recording surface of 757 Mbits per second and a sustained data transfer rate
between ~ 60 Mbytes per second on the outer tracks to 30 Mbytes per second
on the inner tracks. Two of those drives in a striped array can come close
to saturating the 33 MHz X 32 bit PCI bandwidth. Average seek time, for
most desktop computers with modern operating systems and modern file systems
is of less and less importance (Windows 2000 and later using NTFS and
dynamic caching, for example.) Seek time, for a transaction server is
important, but then Gigabytes of main memory and good database algorithms
are a cheaper solution than the mechanical nightmare that slamming the heads
back and forth (which is really a question of iron rather than silicon.
Very little of a desktop's hard drive I/O is anywhere near random access.


There is another "rule of thumb" law, the Amdahl/Case law: "One Megabyte of
memory and One Megabit per second I/O bandwidth is required for each MIPS."
Hmm, that would be, for a Pentium 4 Xeon 3.0 GHz, about 4 Gbytes of memory
and 4 Gigabits per second I/O bandwidth (66 MHz X 64 bit PCI interface
equals about 4 Gigabits per second.) That sounds a lot like a high end
server that would be using a Pentium 4 Xeon 3.0 GHz.
--
Phil Weldon, pweldonatmindjumpdotcom
For communication,
replace "at" with the 'at sign'
replace "mindjump" with "mindspring."
replace "dot" with "."

"Michael Brown" wrote in message
...
Phil Weldon wrote:
[...]
Hard drive capacities and speed are increasing much faster than the
CPU/Memory/Motherboard. The first IBM PC with a hard drive had 640
KBytes memory and a 10 MByte hard drive (and cost $3500.) Today, a
good performance business desktop PC has about 1000 times as much
memory and a hard drive with about 20,000 times as much disk
capacity. As for speed, remember interleaving? The drive
electronics were so slow that physically consecutive sectors could
not be read in one rotation! And the interface was to a 7 MHz ISA
Bus! And transfers were ONE byte at a time!

Though this has slowed dramatically in the last few years. I have a
3-and-a-half year old, 10 gig drive, which was reasonably good at the time
it was bought. It has off-the-platter speeds of around 28 MBytes/sec. New
top-of-the-line IDE drives are still between 50 and 60 mbytes/sec, so
things
have only just doubled in about 42 months. By Moore's law, we should be
should be having drives with speeds of around 140 mbytes/sec off the
platters. Though disk sizes have increased well over what Moore's law
would
give. Also, seeks-per-second have only increased about 40% in the same
period.

[...]

--
Michael Brown
www.emboss.co.nz : OOS/RSI software and more
Add michael@ to emboss.co.nz - My inbox is always open

What do you mean "reduced their warranty from three years down to only one
year"? Who did?

For Hitachi, all Ultra models have a five year warranty and all Deskstar
models with an 8 MByte cache have a three year warranty.

DiamondMax Plus Maxtor drives over 120 Gbyte capacity AND with an 8 Mbyte on
drive cache have a three year warranty, SCSI drives have a five year
warranty.

Western Digital Caviar drives have a three year warranty, Raptor drives a
five year warranty.

EU warranties may be different, but usually a longer minimum for lower end
models.

--
Phil Weldon, pweldonatmindjumpdotcom
For communication,
replace "at" with the 'at sign'
replace "mindjump" with "mindspring."
replace "dot" with "."

"Wazza" wrote in message
...

"cupcake" wrote in message
...
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or just
one
200G??
do hard drive die much these days??

If new hard drives are so good, then why did the manufacturers reduce
their
warranty from 3 years down to only 1 year ?
Your power supply would thank you for only using the 200Gb disk and case
cooling is easier with only 1 HDD as the little suckers run pretty hot. My
slave runs at 53 deg C in the summer and I think I read on a HDD site some
time ago that HDDs don`t like 60 C.
Choice is yours but back up your work regularly.

hi,
thanks for everyones advice...
yeah think i will go with Clint..



"Ed Forsythe" ¦b¶l¥ó
¤¤¼¶¼g...
Hi Cupcake s,
I agree with Clint's method. IMHO, RAID 0 won't give the average user a
really significant performance boost. RAID 1 is a decent backup solution
because you don't have to remember to backup g. I have two WD 80G HDs.
XP, my office applications, and essentially everything else except games
and
junk stuff is loaded there. The 2nd 80G is my D: drive and all games,
sims,
and junk, are loaded there. On the D: drive I have a folder called Backup
and one called Data. About once a week I use Drive Image to create an
image
of the C: drive in the D:\Backup folder. I back up stuff like my address
book, Password Safe, and other important data to the Data folder. That
gives me a little redundancy for files that change frequently. This is not
a
great backup plan but it works for me. Ideally, I should use Drive Image
to
create an image of the C: drive at the end of each day and backup
important
data files to a CD/DVD. Buy the two 100G drives. That way you could
experiment with RAID if you choose or use one as a D: drive for backups.
Don't make the mistake of buying the 200G drive and backing up to a
partition there - that's useless but some do it.
--
Tally Ho!
Ed
"Clint" wrote in message
news:tZtYb.541517$X%5.417720@pd7tw2no...
Depends what you want to do. 2 x 100 in RAID 0 will give you extra
performance, but double your risk of losing your data. 2 x 100 in RAID
1
will give you half the space, but make it much less likely you will lose
your data. 2 x 100 without RAID will twice the space of the RAID 1, but
not
improve the odds that you will lose data.

Personally, I went with a single 200GB drive, with an old 80GB drive for
copying "important" data for backup. It was cheaper than 2 100GB drives
at
$150 after rebates (CND$)

Clint.

"Moods" wrote in message
...
cupcake wrote:
thinking of buying a new hard drive, should i go for two 100G or
just
one 200G??

Get two 100gb en run them raid0 (software or hardware raid)
(Beter: get 2 200gb en run them raid0 ;-))

do hard drive die much these days??

Don't know,.. Not here.

--
Ugh!