Differences in HD's

Whats the difference between a Serial ATA and a Ultra ATA ide HD's? Which is better?

The difference is in the actual connection to your motherboard. An ultra ATA ide drive still uses the old style ribbon cable. SATA is the newest thing and the direction drives are going. These drives are faster, and you will notice a difference if you actually use your machine for heavier performance things such as gaming.

I, personally, run 2 80 Gig Serial drives in RAID-0 on my tower with several other drives in the same machine still. This set up is extremely fast (faster than a single 10,000RPM Raptor drive), but also is not as reliable. You need to keep data backed up elsewhere because if one of your drives fails, you are dead and need to build it from scratch again.

HDD 101.



Only if you do lots of sequertial stuff, random access still the same

Not necessarily. The best way to think of it is, you have 2 drives, 2 cables, going after one chunk of data. The bottlekneck is the RAID controller. In RAID-0, your seek times and your write times are faster than a single drive.

Here is a link to another forum that explains it fairly well:

http://forums.afterdawn.com/thread_view.cfm/80439

1. RAID controllers (esp RAID0) are fast enough to handle it

2. I'll give you the theory point however we need to stop and wonder why games dont benifit from RAIDed drives

3. As for the link, I'm a mod over there too and in fact, i set-up that section of the forum.

4. You dont need to cables to run RAID0 and such you need to consider that scenario as well (yes, not ideal but still apart of the RAID0 spec so to speak)

True. I guess it all depends on what you do. I spend a lot of time tinkering around app to app and don't like to wait. I am a very impatient person. I am not nearly as hardcore of a gamer as I used to be. I more use my desktop for watching movies and surfing/posting now. Thats about it.

I do play world of warcraft, but thats about it for gaming. When it comes to gaming, your biggest place to notice an increase is your amount/speed of memory and your vid card more than anything else. If you have a decent system, this is the bottlekneck. Since in most cases, the game is loaded to memory. You may notice quicker load times, but nothing in the gaming itself.

Good to see people in here from other threads like me. I am actually a fairly frequent poster on www.geekbb.com with a couple friends of mine. This forum is by far a larger forum, so also busier than "geek" is.

Yep: i dunno if yer active member on Afterdawn or not but the usage-profile over at AD is different than here and RAID0 (ugh) has its merit there as there is lots of video streaming, capturing etc whereas here at CF, the primary profile probably falls under "normal" or "gaming" for which I think you can agree with me: RAID0 holds virtually no merit in light of the costs, risks and non-visible performance differences.