Is it worth investing in a RAID system for a home PC?

Question

You may have the latest processor and graphics card but there is always bottleneck at the hard disk. Would it be smarter to invest in a moderate processor,graphics card and get a raid? What are your thoughts on this? I think one of the biggest problems on computers is waiting for the hard disk to stop churning when it is doing something in the background. My PC seems to hang as I need to wait for the access to stop before I can use my computer. My computer is around 4 years old and has a Segate 80GB 7200 RPM drive. I was thinking of upgrading but am wondering if I should invest in a raid drive?

Answer 1

dont go with a raid.
just get a hard drive with higher cach above 16mb.
Also if your motherboard supports SATA get a SATA hard drive.
It sounds more like the ram to me. Try adding more ram.
Also try defraging it.
It acessories>systemtools>defreg

Answer 2

You seem to be under the impression that raid is a type of drive. It's not it is a group of two or more drives. (Redundant array) there are several configurations i.e raid 1 raid 2 etc. They need a motherboard which supports raid and the speed boost comes from a setup known as striping where data is written alternately too two drives. This is faster but doubles the chance of data loss, if one drive fails you lose everything. You can also set up a raid which duplicates any pair of drives keeping your data safe but is slower than a single drive. It's probably not worth it to the average home user. Just go for the fastest drive available with a large cache and defrag regularly. Hope this helps.

Answer 3

Raid systems are useful if you have to do a lot of data read/writes like in DB applications. However for the home user, it's not that much of an issue unless you just have money to spend and want to run a hardware mirror for the sake of having data redundancy (ie..not lose data if you choke a drive).

and defragging weekly b/c you own an 80gb hard drive is some of the most useless advise i've ever heard.

Answer 4

YES !!!

RAID (mirror) is what you need to survive a disk crash (drives used to come with 5 year guarantees = if yours is 4 years old, start to worry now).

When did you last do a back up to external media ??

To find out if you will survive a disk crash, pull out the disk data and power cables. Then turn on the PC ....

Answer 5

I dont really see the need to be honest for a home user. Your better off upgrading to a pc with a high end processor maybe get a dual core and good amout of ram say 1Gig this should help you out.

Answer 6

You will only notice a benefit if you are a heavy games player. If you aren't then a larger disc would be more beneficial.
I notice you only have 80gb, with that size you should defragment weekly, that will make a big difference to your speed.

Answer 7

* have you ever defrag your hddisk ?
* if you often do data hundreds of MB / day, you should defrag your hddisk every 2 days (at least)
* defrag process took 1 minute to 2-3 hrs
* yes raid system is necessary if you have minimal 10-20 GB of data

Answer 8

I upgraded from living house windows XP professional to Wndows Vista living house top type and happy that i did. one element you're able to desire to undergo in suggestions is that Microsoft is going to stop helping living house windows XP interior the close to destiny. I have not have been given any complaints with Vista in any respect.

Answer 9

I urge you to read this first, then you decide what's best for you.

http://www.overclockers.com/articles1356/