Serial ATA - 1 drive or 2?

[XPerties]

Having spent about $600 in some new upgrades for my PC (watercooling, UV, sleeving, MB and CPU) I have been looking at adding a Western Digital Raptor.

Now from what I have read running in raid 0 gives you a large performance boost but doesn't offer the best data recovery. However running raid 1 does give you great data recovery but the performance is lower.

I'm looking at getting either 2 36.7GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive or 1 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive. Obviously getting 1 74GB drive won't give me any advantages to run any raid but my funds are low at the moment.

Which solution would be best for me?

1. 2 36.7GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive running in raid0

2. 2 36.7GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive running in raid1

3. 1 74GB Serial ATA 10,000RPM Hard Drive and saving money up and grabbing another 74GB then running in either raid0 or raid1.

Your question to me will probably be "Do you want data recovery?". The answer is yes. So assuming that raid0 would be out of the question.

So the next question would be:

1. Would running a single Serial ATA 10,000RPM be a better performance boost over running my normal 7200 drives for my main drive?

Thank you for your time.

[Treeman]

Well let's see, I know . . . save another 200 bucks and go for the two 74gb Raptors!

Raid/0

A third cheaper Ide hard drive can be used within Win XP with a application called Casper XP. Casper XP is not imaging drive software that makes you boot with .dos disks like Partition Magic. Nope, if your raid goes bad all you do is fix the array, connect the Ide hard drive as your 1st. boot device, and copy everything including the O.S. back from within a Windows shell.

You can see the software here:Casper Xp

I have a buddy that has two of the smaller Raptors and wishes he would have waited.

The two I have scream, and are very stable.

I bought them at Atacom.com without any hassle. I think I paid $208 each.

IMHO, go for the gusto.

Treeman

[Laser2100]

Get 2 36.7GB WD Raptors in RAID 0 and a third drive to store data on. Run Windows, applications, and games off of the RAID array.

If you're worried about losing data in RAID 0, you shouldn't be. The Raptors come with 5-year warranties, and as long as you keep them cool they should last you a long time.

Good luck with the new system. Personally, I'm holding off until PCI-Express goes mainstream. Then we're going to see some huge performance leaps.