Minime80
01-22-2004, 04:48 AM
I'm in the mood for spending some bucks, and since I hold all of you on this forum in the highest regard (been helped many a time) I thought I'd ask for everyone's opinion.
I'm planning on buying two hard drives to put in a RAID0 array and dual boot XP and Debian (kernel 2.6).
I can't make up my mind between the 250GB Hitachi 7K250's or the 74GB WD Raptor's. Both are similarly priced.
I do quite a bit of DVD copying (totally legal... I swear ;) ) which would seem to favor the Hitachi's since they have almost equal sustained throughput and have much more capacity, plus the thought of having 500GB of storage almost makes me cream in my pants. I also do a lot of programming (C++ and Assembly mostly), though I'm not sure which drive would perform better in that regard.
OTOH, the rest of the time I just kind of mess around. Lot's of surfing, and downloading of music (also totally legal), some word processing, a few games here and there... etc. Most of these it seems to me would favor the Raptors because of their lower seek times.
So, here I am in a bit of a pickle. Do I go for the mass storage, or does the performance difference tip the scales? 148GB seems like enough, but that 500GB is soooo tempting. I'll probably be perfectly happy either way, but I'm horrible when it comes to making decisions. I always get it down to two and can't decide from there.
Let me know what you guys think. I just want to put my mind at ease and settle on one. Thanks a bunch.
I'm planning on buying two hard drives to put in a RAID0 array and dual boot XP and Debian (kernel 2.6).
I can't make up my mind between the 250GB Hitachi 7K250's or the 74GB WD Raptor's. Both are similarly priced.
I do quite a bit of DVD copying (totally legal... I swear ;) ) which would seem to favor the Hitachi's since they have almost equal sustained throughput and have much more capacity, plus the thought of having 500GB of storage almost makes me cream in my pants. I also do a lot of programming (C++ and Assembly mostly), though I'm not sure which drive would perform better in that regard.
OTOH, the rest of the time I just kind of mess around. Lot's of surfing, and downloading of music (also totally legal), some word processing, a few games here and there... etc. Most of these it seems to me would favor the Raptors because of their lower seek times.
So, here I am in a bit of a pickle. Do I go for the mass storage, or does the performance difference tip the scales? 148GB seems like enough, but that 500GB is soooo tempting. I'll probably be perfectly happy either way, but I'm horrible when it comes to making decisions. I always get it down to two and can't decide from there.
Let me know what you guys think. I just want to put my mind at ease and settle on one. Thanks a bunch.