i would just like to praise Maxtor for bringing out a set of hard drives that are truly fantastic, i have just brought 2 Maxtor DiamondMax 9 160GB 7200rpm 8mb cache Sata hard drives, i have them now setup in RAID and installing games takes literally a matter of seconds compared to my 7200rpm 2mb cache ATA 100 hard drive (excelsor).. maxtor have not been to great on their previous hard drives as they have been unstable, unreliable and not very fast.. This hard drive is amazing.. i can copy a 700MB movie from CD / DVD to my hard drive in such a short time is unbelievable.. installing XP was v.funny as on my old ata100 7200rpm 2mb cache hard drive XP took around 10 minutes to copy over the installation files from cd to hard drive.. this time round with the new maxtors the copying of the installation files was almost instant! can't wait till my Barton arrives just to ask i ordered a retail pack, because ebuyer didn't have any decent cooling heatsinks.. will the stock heatsink be ok for overclocking? i have an Antec p160 with a Artic cooling VGA Silencer for 9500/9600/9700/9800 cards.. and 2 x 120mm Antec Case Fans... My case temperature is: 14 - 20C
Nope you can forget ocing with the stock heatsink. I suggest you get an slk-800A if your board has no mounting holes but if it does, grab the slk-900U, both from thermalright. In my mind, the slk-900A is just too heavy to be hanging from the socket, that's why I suggest grabbing the next best thing in the event that your board has no mounting holes. Pair that with a good Panaflo 80mm fan and you should be good to go.
thats a point..considering i only learnt exactly what RAID is a couple days ago, does having a RAID Configuration speed up the installation/whatever? Or is it just the high quality disks that help?
RAID can be faster, but it can be slower too, depending on the mode you use. RAID 0 is the faster mode you have available to you, and RAID 1 is the slower mode. There are more RAID levels (2-7), but you won't have them without a controller card anyway. RAID 0 makes a virtual hard drive out of (the number of hard drives in the array)x the smallest hard drive. So there is a reason to have the same sized hard drives. The data is spread out through different disks, so writing and access is faster. However, if one drive fails, you're screwed since part of all your data is on the borked drive. Hard drives are mechanical and will fail at some point. You learn things like that when you use IBM 60GXP's in RAID 0.
lol would scuzzy's be a good idea to get? All i know is that they are fast, and not a lot else. one more question, to save a new thread - what's the maximum amount of RAM a non server can have? I have seen 16gb servers, but I can't imagine that 16gb is the largest available.
SCSI...On one hand, they have up to 15,000RPM hard drives and you can have 7 or 15 devices per chain, unlike the SATA and IDE, which are limited to 1 or 2 devices, respectively. On the other hand, I've been hearing that the Western Digital raptors are just as fast as the 10,000RPM SCSI drives these days. In 32-bit, you can have up to 4GB max. After that you'll need a combination of extra hardware (seen on server-class mobo's) and an OS to support over 4GB. With a 64-bit setup (Itainium, Opteron/Athlon 64, Nacona core for the Xeon), you're raising the RAM limit to somewhere in the terabyte range IIRC---natively.
Yeah, but 128MB used to be high-end too. I wouldn't be surprised if 1TB is standard in another 20 years. 1GB is starting to become the preferred amount.
