Hard Drive Configurations

Hey all,

I'm planning on upgrading my computer over the course of the next 6 months or so. Right now I'm using two Seagate PATA drives in the following set up. Drive A is the OS along with general applications (firefox, thunderbird, office, etc) and documents. There's also movie files and some other random things. Drive B is where I have all my games, music, and other files. Both drives are configured to use 2-4GB of swap space since I've read in several places that swap on a non-OS drive is good since you can access the swap file independently of what the OS is doing giving lower access time to the swap file.

Drive A is approaching 6 years old and drive B is probably close to 3 or 4 (can't find any record of the purchase for some reason). Since I don't want to be caught off guard by drive A going kaboom I'd like to get these replaced pretty soon as I don't have any backup system in place.

The current plan is to retain the current configuration but with two pairs (80GB for pair A, 250+GB for pair B) of SATA drives arranged with RAID 1 for each pair. However, I suspect this is going to be overkill. Does anyone know if there's any significant performance gain to have two RAID 1 arrays with individual swapfiles for the OS on each array? From what I understand, two large hard drives in a RAID array would give me presumably a setup with the swapfile similar to what I'm already doing with the PATA drives. I don't think the performance boost will be much more significant with 4 drives instead of 2. OS will be Windows XP Pro until I find a need for Vista.

Thoughts?

Hmmm. Good points. I was considering getting something like a mid-sized MyBook for external backup depending on what I opted to do with the internal drives.

The 400GB drive I was looking at has 16MB cache vs. 8MB on the 80. So yeah, definitely better performance on the bigger drive.

640 GB would be overkill for me. I've got ~240GB and i'm still a good 40 GB short of maxing out although I did some boneheaded things with partition sizes which I won't do again. Like allocating a 10 GB FAT partition "in case I want to try Linux" three years. I'm still single-booting XP. I think I'll probably get 400 GB and if I need more space, by then 1 TB drives should be pretty affordable...

I swear by Seagate. I've had very little trouble with their drives. Although I haven't bought anything from them since the Maxtor merger. Hopefully it hasn't changed. But from what I hear Caviars are on par with the Barracuda line. Solid choice