Grant schrieb:
My desktop currently runs one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148140
I'm pretty much out of space and I'm trying figure out the best way to
expand. The factors to consider are cost, capacity, speed, noise, and
heat.
So you don't care about security, right? With security I mean redundancy
(RAID1,5,10,...)
Should I get another identical drive and set up RAID, or will
that create too much noise and heat?
A RAID won't cause more heat or noise than a second drive but it will
also not necessarily solve your problem: RAID0 gives you the capacity of
both drives combined and a lot of speed but if one of the disks dies,
all data is lost. RAID1 spends the complete capacity of one of the
drives for redundancy. RAID5 needs three drives (so it doesn't fit into
your cost, noise and heat requirements), gives you the capacity of two
and enough redundancy to loose one disk. However, its write performance
isn't extremely high.
Should I get rid of my current
drive and get a new drive, or will that not be much faster?
Your drive is good, why should you scrap it?
Velociraptors are reputed to be very fast, but $200 for 300GB is
pretty expensive and 1TB would require 4 drives which I think would
create a lot of noise and heat.
There are two "brute force" ways for an HDD to get faster: You increase
their rpm or you increase their storage density (so that in one
rotation, the r/w head can read/write more data). The latter has the
advantage that it causes no additional heat or noise but more rpm give
you lower access times.
I'd say if you don't care about redundancy, you should go for a single
1TB disk. I'd prefer a Samsung Spinpoint F1. Spinpoints have the
reputation of being a good mix between cost effectiveness, speed and noise.
Then I would use it (and the older disk) in an LVM volume group. LVM
also supports mirroring (like RAID1) and striping (like RAID0) on a
per-volume basis. That means that you could keep most of your data
somewhere on the TB disk and still experiment with mirroring and
striping using both disks for partitions which need more speed or more
security.
