Gaming New computer system another few questions

[qlum]

If you have a single drive, you can't mirror it. Even if you divide it into 2 partitions and have one set to mirror the first, that does nothing to protect your data from a hardware failure, which is the entire point of mirror raid.

Besides, 500GB is plenty. It's enough to hold Windows, my entire music collection, a few games, several movies and still have space left over for downloading. By the time you fill it up, you'll probably have saved enough to add 1TB or more to it.

like I said in my previous post 2 1tb drives in raid is only 20€ more expensive than two 500gb drives even if you don't need the space now it may delay the need of upgrading your drives in the future

 

[Splych]

why spend more , when you can save ?
i'd rather go for a 2x500GB RAID than a 2x1TB RAID where i could use the spare money for other funding:
- better Graphics Card
- more RAM
- extra Fans for cooling
- save it .

 

[FAST6191]

re the extra 20 Euros- it is up to you but whenever I build machines I am always sit there looking at parts lists and seeing that the extra cost of a evening takeout could bump one or more of my parts up into the next performance bracket.

As for the conversation on hard drives I am not sure about the reliability of new drives in as much as them not being great* but usage differs. To this end backups are more important than ever and secondly most of that list of programs would not tax a decent machine from a few years ago. Were I to see slowdowns with such usage I would first look at the hard drive- consider a small fast one for programs and vital data for them. Save the big stuff for the media collection.


*before examples appear
-every computer fixing/building type has had at least one nightmare scenario after about a year of playing the game.
-RAID- two drives, same model, same batch, same machine, same usage almost by definition, more heat/thrashing than ever before and you wondered why both crashed soon after each other?
-your and my windows 3.11 installs were probably identical aside from the games (which we probably ran from dos) and my like of houndstooth and the 20 minutes spent shuffling floppy discs is far removed from the hours of drivers and config/service packs (slipstreaming aside).
-your external USB drive is an overheating piece of junk that you have dropped more than once.
-relatively speaking there is no comparable mass market disc medium that stacks up against a hard drive (USB possibly excepted) these days.
I could go on but the point is times have changed (also your hour of schoolwork is nothing like the incredibly valuable database or three you now have responsibility for) and drawing on past experience is perhaps not the best idea.