I went to dedicated OS drives with my new motherboards for an entirely unrelated reason. I bought all new 500GB sata drives to build the system with, then discovered that that XP's installation program doesn't contain SATA drivers. Rather than go through all the effort of building a new XP installation with the drivers i grabbed the old 160GB IDE drives i had left over, formatted them, and used them as the "C:" drives in the new systems. With the OS and a huge host of software, My Documents, email spools, etc on them they're still about 80% empty.

It works very well. Performance of the boot drive is not critical at all.

I agree with gwailo .. Last 2 years, I've been using a 150 gig 10,000 rpm WD Raptor drive as my boot drive on a Q6600 system. It boots Vista 64 in 45-50 seconds. I'm convinced it has improved my performance on Vegas. Worked out for me.

So anywhere from an 80-160 gig-ish drive should be sufficient for all the apps? I know I could pull my hard drive with the messed up Windows on it and hook it up, but I'm too lazy to do that and check how much I'm using right now.

I see this is a thing of opinion on normal drives vs. 10,000rpm drives. I'm not sure what route I'll go, but I'm not overly picky.

I think I'm going to go with a Core 2 Quad Q9550 as well. I got my mobo a few months ago and don't want to replace it already and go for the i7 stuff just yet.

If you have a few matched 500 GB HDDs I would just use what you have and set up a RAID array with them - it will help protect you from bad sectors in the OS and if you split the Array into 2 partitions - keep your data on the large one and OS on the small one you can reinstall an OS easily like Win7 and not have to worry about the data. Most boards now days have 6 SATA ports - use 4 for a RAID 10 array with OS and Data, 1 for a Single disk to back up your Data on, and leave one for your burner - The RAID 10 Array with decent drives will smoke any single SATA disk including 10,000 RPM drives for throughput / boot speed / cache speed. If you only have 3 matched disks, set up a RAID 5 Array still fast just not as fast as RAID10. For OS size I use a 200gb partition which is more than enough for applications - you have plenty for documents and data as well. 80GB would be sufficient for applications only I think, however you really don't want to run a drive close to full as the performance will drop and it's harder to defragment them, I think you need at least 14 percent free for Windows Defragging.

My personal choice for drives is WD Caviar Blacks - I have 4 640GBs in a Raid 10 array which is very fast in any benchmarking tests I have run. They aren't raid edition but they don't drop drives like some of the lower priced models periodically. I haven't seen a reason to pay the price for RE drives yet just to get the TLR firmware.

If you go with a WD raptor - I would not get the 74 GB - it's a bit dated and not as fast as the newer ones - the 150 or 300's are newer, faster and quieter.

Well, I didn't grab a dedicated OS drive, and then came home and ran into some bizarre Partition Magic error so I can't see my second data partition unless I take out the drive and make it a slave to another computer...so now I'm definitely buying another drive.

This is what I'm thinking. I understand the basics of RAID, but never actually configured a setup. I use an Asus P5Q motherboard with 2 SATA ports dedicated to some sort of RAID thing -- but I'm not clear if it's some sort of weird backup program that came with the mobo or real RAID or what. Can I just use whatever SATA ports I wish? I have 6 I believe.

My goal is to have a smaller OS drive and I have 2 500 drives I want to mirror (they can contain basic documents, photos, MP3s, etc.) and another set of 2 500 gig drives I want to mirror (this is all my audio mixing and video editing stuff). Can I do this within my tower? I'm still using Windows XP as well.

I was reading online and noticed a comment about RAID not being good for backing up data or something...would I face any sort of issues if I did a RAID 1? If a drive died, could I still access the other drive or would I have to wait until I bought a new replacement drive for the dead one?

I'm going to make an image file of my OS and probably store it on an external I have. This day in age of digital photographs and all, especially, I plan on eventually making some offsite backups too.

Or would I need something like this?

http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=014530&cid=IOC.898.158

you have RAID capability on the ICH10R that should support RAID10 - check the BIOS section of you manual to be sure. Don't use the two SATA ports for the silicon image chipset RAID - most of the time those are slower than ICH10R not to mention you only have 2 drives to work with - so you're limited to RAID0 (no error protection) or RAID1 (no speed improvement). Use the SATA Ports that are the same color - and use the Ports 0-3 for the RAID dirves - use Port 4 for a Back up drive if you like, and Port 5 for your Burner - I always write on the drive cords the port number so if you need to replace a drive its easier.

I wouldn't buy a separatte RAID card unless you get a good one with a battery back up and 256 or more onboard RAM so you can fully utilize caching - The ICH10R is very fast and you won''t much in speed unless you get a nice RAID card - the one you listed isn't one of the better ones - figure $300-$400 for a good 4 port RAID card. Adaptec or 3Ware are good brands

If you have your manual follows the instructions for setting up a bootable array and you should be golden. You have to go into your BIOS and enable RAID there first, then to the RAID set up and select the disks you want to use - then load the OS - Loading the OS is a bit easier on Vista than XP - With XP you will need to make a floppy of the RAID driver for your Operating system first - hit F6 when you are loading windows at the beginning. With the righ version of Vista you will have the RAID driver already on the disk, if not you can use the floppy or a USB drive to load the driver.

RAID 10 is very good (with a dedicated RAID card) to give you performance and to keep your computer up and running 24 hours a day. It is not the best for backing up data. I find daily backups to be more useful. It essentially gives you a day to realize you need to restore something before it is gone forever.

Without a specialized RAID card with a separate processor a RAID 10 setup will speed up your hard drives but will slow your computer down overall and steal processing power away from Vegas.

I would strongly advise avoiding RAID because the new SSD drives that are now available, are giving RAID 1 type performance without any added complexity and without taxing the processors.

My next purchase is likely to be an X-25M intel ssd drive for a win7 boot disk.

Check out an excellent article on the new batch of SSD drives here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-x25-m-vertex,2399.html

Gwallo,

I guess I would disagree with you on the RAID using the CPU excessively - at most you will get 3% CPU overhead on RAID on an ICH10R - That's based on personal benchmarking with several tools - While I agree an good RAID card helps in a number of ways, they are by no means a requirement for good raid. I can get about 200MB /sec on a RAID10 array on ICH10R and 230 on a 3WARE 9650Se in RAID10. The advantage of the 3WARE card is onboard cache and battery BU along with better performance in overlapped IO.

RAID as a sole means of back up is not a good idea I agree - that's why I recommended using a single disk for regular back ups on a frequency of choice.

If you like the speed of SSDs - put them in RAID0 or 10 and see what they'll do! :) For now I'm going to stick with spinning drives, SSDs are a bit to tempermental for my tastes and seem to be degrading losing speed overtime. My spinning disks just keep going, and going.....

4 500GB WD Caviar Blacks will run about $240 and provide 1TB of redundant drive capacity when set up in RAID10 - that's a pretty low price by comparison to the SSD options that are high speed / quality.

Smash, If you have trashed your set yet try this fix. Otherwise keep it for future reference. It worked for me last time I had a problem.

Lynn

Configure automatic administrator logon for Recovery Console
To set an automatic administrator logon for the Recovery Console, complete the following steps while you are logged on with administrative credentials:
1. Click Start, and then click Control Panel.
2. Click Switch to Classic View in the right pane, double-click Administrative Tools, and then double-click Local Security Policy.
3. Expand Security Settings, expand Local Policies, and then click Security Options.
4. Double-click the Recovery Console: Allow automatic administrative logon policy, and then set it to Enable.

The policy is effective immediately. Make sure that you reopen the Local Security Policy snap-in to make sure that the effective setting for the policy is "Enabled."
The next time that you start to Recovery Console, you are not prompted for a password.

After you complete this procedure, the SecurityLevel DWORD registry value data is set to 1 in the following registry key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Setup\RecoveryConsole