Legit Reviews

I am not a gamer, I trade stocks and program. My current Athlon based system hits 100% CPU utilization way too often and going forward I will be adding a number of background tasks. So I decided to build a lot of machine and ordered up the 975XBX2KR, Intel Quad Core 2.4Ghz Q6600, two 74GB Raptors, and two sets of Corsair TWINX 2048MB PC6400 DDR2 RAM. I will be running XP.

I wondering about the best setup for the drives for my situation. I want my system to start fast and be reliable but my important data will be backed up to DVDs or external storage - so it's not like I will have a brain hemorrhage if a drive goes bad. Given the speed and reliability of the Raptor, should I even bother with RAID? Based on my limited hardware knowledge, my guess regarding my options is that I do not really want RAID 0 because it can be less reliable, RAID 1 would be okay for me because it should increase speed and performance (at the expense of capacity), or I could just plain skip RAID and run straight SATA drives? If the latter, should I put the OS on one drive and the apps on another? How bad would it be for me to load the OS an my Apps on one drive, get a cheaper 7200 SATA for general storage (and then I would take the second Raptor and use it as the primary drive in the next system that I will probably build within a month).

Anything special that I should be aware of when I build the system up?

You answered your own question. skip RAID and run straight SATA drives. Use your second raptor for next build and get a larger storage drive.

I had two raptors 150G each in raid 0. Went back to straight SATA drives after one drive got messed up. Now both raptors are happy.

If your worried about possible data loss (as a programmer/stock trader I assume you are), then RAID would be a great option. You could easily set your system up to run your raptors as mirrors (RAID1) so that if one drive goes down, you still have ALL of your info on the other hard drive. No having to worry about burning everything to DVD.

If you need the Gb, you could also return one of the raptors and get two higher capacity drives (say 300Gb) that are slower (and therefore cheaper) and use those in RAID1 for your data and only run your OS and programs off the raptor. That way you have fast system load times and redundant data in case a data drive goes down. If you lose the os drive (the raptor), it's a simple reinstall on a new drive.