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    Need help picking one of the components - HDD

    Discussion in 'Hardware Components and Aftermarket Upgrades' started by coleco, Apr 17, 2008.

  1. coleco

    coleco Notebook Enthusiast

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    Hey everyone,
    I will be brief. I am going to get a Sager NP9262 with an e8400 cpu, 8800GTX SLI, after my next pay check. I have been looking over these forums in great detail and understand the issues about sli or not, a quad core overclocked vs a dual core, etc. Let me say this is for gaming and gaming only. I want to play all of the nicest games such as crysis, cod4, etc.

    The only question I have is which HD to choose. I have read through a lot of these posts and I understand that a 5400 320GB would be better than a 7200 200GB for cooling, etc. but here is where I am lost. I do not understand where the cache size and raid issues come into play. Knowing this is for gaming, and this laptop must last a long time (I last purchased a laptop 2001)
    what single hd or combination would you recommend?
    a single large 5400, two 320GB 5400 in sli, two large 7200 in sli, etc. I assume I want one with the 300 SATA II vs the 150. I can afford 2 of the 5400 320GB serial-ATA II. With raid 0 would that be a good option? would theses 2 5400s now be worse heat wise than the one 7200 with the 16mb cache. Very confused...

    I cannot figure out the correct choice using Tom's hd charts and looking through these forums. most of the debate is 5400 vs 7200. the raid 0 and cache size issue is not to obvious to me. I dont mind spending a little more for the best. I am unclear how to balance the size, speed, gaming performance, heat, etc.
    Any thoughts would be really appreciated. If there is a thread that talks about the raid, cache, etc and not just the size of the single or dual drives I would be more than happy to look through that. Thanks so much.

    Coleco
     
    coleco, Apr 17, 2008
    #1
  2. kuncheesh

    kuncheesh Notebook Evangelist

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    is this post complete ???
     
    kuncheesh, Apr 17, 2008
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  3. coleco

    coleco Notebook Enthusiast

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    sorry, I just added more. I hit the submit button by mistake. I apologize. Newbie.
     
    coleco, Apr 17, 2008
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  4. kuncheesh

    kuncheesh Notebook Evangelist

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    how come HDD come in SLi. SLi is for graphics cards and RAID is for hard drives
     
    kuncheesh, Apr 17, 2008
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  5. kuncheesh

    kuncheesh Notebook Evangelist

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    the best option for performance is 2x 7200 rpm in RAID 0.
    the heat differsnce between 7.2k and 5.4k is very very negligible

    ur hdd is the slowest component in normal use for the computer and remember the performance of a machine very much depends on the performance of the slowest component. so always go with the 7.2k drive.
     
    kuncheesh, Apr 17, 2008
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  6. coleco

    coleco Notebook Enthusiast

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    hehe. sorry about that. I actually did know that although you would not know that by my terribly written post.
    I appreciate the response and may pull the trigger on 2 7200s with Raid 0.
     
    coleco, Apr 17, 2008
    #6