best layout for 4 x hard drives

dr strangelove

Hi,
I'm in the process of building my new PC and i have 4 x seagate baracuda 7200rpm 80gb 8mb cache drives (that i have already) and was trying to decide the best layout for them. My first thought is to have 1 drive with just the O/S and the other 3 drives RAID 0 where i'll install my games.
The machine is going to be used primarily for gaming and also general use. I've got another machine for storage, so i'll storing very little on the machine itself.

Anyone got any better ideas?
Ta

Kali

My first thought is to have 1 drive with just the O/S and the other 3 drives RAID 0 where i'll install my games.

One HD dies and you'll lose all your games... or else your system partition, if you're comfortable reinstalling the lot (or will have ghost images etc.) then go for it.. personally I'd go with RAID 1+0 for the 4 disks... which should give you 160GB, more than enough if your main storage is elsewhere.

mukki

i'd go with kali raid 0+1 is the way to go, that way xp, media player, Iexplorer, your games, etc, will be installed on the higher bandwith drives and your photos will be safe in a hard drive crash

having said that (touch wood), i have only ever had 1 hard drive crash out of well over 100, it was an IBM drive

can you connect more them 2 drives to your raid hardware, a lot of motherboards only allow 2 and the rest or ide or plain sata

dr strangelove

I'm not too fussed about saving stuff to this PC, it's a pure games machine and i want to keep it as clean as possible.
After two disasterous incidents a while back i'm in the habit of getting the machine stable then taking an image of it, and updating it every once in a while (normally right after someone says "oooohh, my machine just crashed, can you fix it for me?).
I'm aiming for maximum performance for gaming really.

8T8

I'm not too fussed about saving stuff to this PC, it's a pure games machine and i want to keep it as clean as possible.
After two disasterous incidents a while back i'm in the habit of getting the machine stable then taking an image of it, and updating it every once in a while (normally right after someone says "oooohh, my machine just crashed, can you fix it for me?).
I'm aiming for maximum performance for gaming really.

RAID 0+1 is still the way to go.

There really isn't any other majorly better scenario, if you wanted to you could simply create two RAID 0 arrays with one for the OS and one for everything else but I don't really see the point if storage is not an issue as RAID 0+1 will do the job and give you some immediate recovery options.

dr strangelove

Cheers lads,
I've gone with raid 0+1 (pain in the ass to set up, but still) and everything's working fine.