looking at the following...

2x 320gb seagate 7200 as boot/program drives
1tb sata WD for storage, but if i get enough stuff ill go to 4 of them in RAID 5
i7 920 core
gtx 295
whatever mobo... 3gb ram...
RV01 Raven for the case

thats a beast of a machine, my only suggestion would be to consider RAID 10 or even 4x RAID 0 for your hard drives

if you have 4 raid 0 HDDs, you will gain 4x speed (i assume you already know that). Because the hard drives are exactly the same, they are being used for the same time, and with the same ammounts of data being written to them , they should all last around the same time. This means that RAID0 will not shorten the life of your volume, and is the best way to go for performance

the storage drive(s) doent have to be lightning fast and ill have the option to change that later i think.. might be making some big files down the track

Very nice. I should really get my head around RAID at some point.

In Trae's position, i wouldnt do anything else bar a form of RAID 5, as he can lose a hdd and still retain the Array.

I've got 2x320's in Raid 0 for performace (OS) and 3 500GB drives standalone for media storage.

gettnig the dell 22inch ips ultrasharp for display too. maybe two.

DaemonFTW wrote:

In Trae's position, i wouldnt do anything else bar a form of RAID 5, as he can lose a hdd and still retain the Array.

I've got 2x320's in Raid 0 for performace (OS) and 3 500GB drives standalone for media storage.

if trae wants reliability and performance he cant do better than RAID10. It is faster than RAID5 if using 4 hard drives (just google raid5 vs raid10) and can survive a faliure of two hard drives. Thats the set up im using and its helped me many times.

sorry to steer this thread off track, but is it hard to set up 2 monitors?

very unique case. it makes more sense than any other computer case.. cuz it's easier to get hot air up and out. Instead of front case then the back of the case and out XD

Carts wrote:

sorry to steer this thread off track, but is it hard to set up 2 monitors?

nah man.. bout as hard as changing your desktop picture.

sweet, i might do that. gotta 17 inch sitting there doing nothing.

cheers trae

only problem is if uve only got 1xvga and 1xdvi and the monitors dont have both, some only have one or the other

u can get converters tho

but for a home rig you wouldnt really justify the expense of Raid 10. (2 drives going to redundancy)

agreed wounded

just to let you know going raid on 4 hdd isn't as good as you think, if you wanna go raid then use only 2 hdd for it you will end up with better results. Because what happens as if system reads from hdd 1 then 2 then 3, hdd 1 is ready again and not doing anything just waiting for the system to finish with hdd 3 and 4 where is if you have 2 you have both hdd in costant action giving you better results. I know 4 sounds really good but take my word for it you will end up spending that extra money for nothing

the guys computer at work fried one drive and we lost our entire graphics load, tens of thousands of images, generics and logos. so after seeing that happen and the havoc it causes im thinking of going redundant with the 4x1tb drives in raid5...

like I said before, if you want best speed and security RAID10 (mirroring+striping) is much better than raid5 if using only 4 hard drives, it gives double security and speed, with better performance and relability than RAID5

Holy Hard drives batboy, Someone needs a lesson in backing their work stuff up.

Man that kind of stuff should be backed up at least weekly if not daily, and someone needs to verify the backup copies are OK or else they may find themselves in the current situation of having squat.

How hard is it to zip the stuff up and burn it to a dvd ??? So what if you end up with a office full of dvd's better than losing months or even years worth of work that'll all need to be re-done from scratch.

And what if something really bad happens like a power surge / lightning strike and the whole array gets fried .... back ups my friend are easily re-loaded onto a new machine, and it is certainly a lot easier than trying to catch the blue smoke so it can be put back into them after they've fried.

trust me troppo lol we know now. we back it all up to our new personal NAS. funny thing was, it happened 3 weeks before the launch of a new look, so not only did we have to recreate the old graphics but the new ones too.

and my friend who's setting it up for me doesn't recommend raid10 so i'll stick with 5

could always attempt a platter transplant into a drive of identical make/firmware etc.

i read an article somewhere (Can't find link) where a guy did it. the final HDD was a bit flakey but was able to recover the data he thought he had lost

getting a controller - (Dell LSI PERC5i PERC 5i 5/i perc5 SAS raid/battery/cable) from america, mate showed me it in action - started a huge file transfer and just yanked the first drive clean out and the computer didnt even notice lol, sold me. put it back in and the others automatically rebuilt it.

so im currently here -

corei7 (the cheapest one)
GTX295 Palit
3gig of DDR3 - the elite stuff
RV01 Raven case, 22inch Dell IPS monitor
2x500gb Raid0 7200rpm boot discs
4x1tb raid5 7200rpm storage (2.8 usable space i think?)

some other epic stuff. ill get the exact product specs and pictures in a week when its all done. thinking about going straight windows7 on it, id love to skip vista entirely.

just hope that another drive doesnt fail during the rebuild seeing as they would typically be from the same batch with similar fail times.

well if your luck is that bad your gonna lose em no matter what ya do