Part research

Time to start getting a grasp of the new hardware technologies available. Post one: hard drives.

Obviously we're going SATA II here. I am doing a RAID mirror (1) with two Seagate drives minimum 1 TB.

15TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 SATA II (32mb Cache) - http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX21884(ME).aspx


1 TB (same specs but iwth NCQ) - http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/PID-MX18814(ME).aspx


NCQ = native command queuing. Review @ http://techreport.com/articles.x/7750

[img]http://techreport.com/r.x/nforce4-ultra/ncq-diagram.gif[/img]
simple. if it works.

But to read the conclusion, it really has little effect on benching at this time.

A review of the 1.5 TB @ http://techreport.com/articles.x/15730/12 also is alarming -

"The fact that the 1.5TB Barracuda excels in some arenas and stumbles badly in others makes me question Seagate's decision to pair its new 375GB platters with a year-old 7200.11 core. Even in its day, the original 7200.11 wasn't the fastest drive on the market; in some instances, the one-point-five is actually slower. If you're looking to cram as much capacity as possible into a 3.5" drive bay, the 'cuda is certainly the best option by a good 500GB. However, the drive's poor real-world write speeds make it a tough sell for PC enthusiasts who can find much better all-around performance elsewhere."

tbc..