Like the title says... my 500GB WD Caviar Black is running out of available space (it's nowhere close to "out" yet, but it's getting there... and Steam's summer sales aren't helping the situation ) On my previous PC I topped out at around 200GB used on its hard drive, so when I built this PC I thought "surely I'll never need more than 500 gigs!"... well that was before I had a Steamapps folder that was 200GB and growing.
So I need a larger primary drive, and I've been considering two options:
1. Buy a second 500GB Caviar Black and run RAID 0. This should also have the added benefit of more speed in certain situations in addition to the additional space. The obvious big problem here is the increased risk of drive failure. I don't have anything on my PC that I can't afford to lose/don't have backups of, but it would be pretty inconvenient if the array did go down because one of the disks failed.
2. Buy a 1TB drive. If I get a Samsung Spinpoint F3 (I currently use one as my FRAPS/video storage drive) this will only be $5 more than the RAID 0 option. I won't have to worry about RAID related issues, but the big question here is what would I use the 500GB drive I have now for? One thought I did have was to just swap the two drives I have now, use my Spinpoint F3 as my primary drive and my Caviar Black as my Fraps/Video drive... but I don't think 500GB won't be enough for the secondary drive.
So what do yall think, go RAID 0 and risk drive failure, or go with a 1TB drive and have an extra 500GB one laying around with no purpose?
The easiest and simplest solution is to just add the 1TB drive as a secondary drive to store anything on. I tend to use secondary drives for movies, music and games, with my main drive for OS and documents. You might chose to have this drive as your main game drive too with fraps running on the secondary drive.
Also people seem to be worrying an aweful lot about harddrive failures... they're really not that common. Even with 2 drives in RAID the chances of the ARRAY failing is less than 1% with the chance of the individual drive failing less than 0.5%
Just buy a 1TB (or 2TB) external to use as storage, and keep the 500 for games and stuff that you need quick reference for. Cost 100$ and will give you some mobility.
I know drive failures aren't that common. In all the years I've been using PCs (since the days when Doom and Wolfenstein were the shit ) I've never had a drive fail on me. That's why I'm considering RAID 0 in the first place...I just figured the time I did decide to try it would be the time a failure would happen
Also, I don't have much in terms of documents and music and stuff that could be moved to a different drive to save space. My users folder (music, documents, etc) is only 15GB... which is nothing compared to the 250+gigs of games I have. I could try moving the Steam folder to the secondary drive, but the whole reason I bought that drive in the first place was so I wasn't running games from AND recording Fraps videos on the same drive. Basically, I want a 1TB setup for my primary drive.
If it's just games that you need access to I would buy a 1TB Western Digital Caviar Black then, last I seen they were about 90$. Keep that 500 for a back-up, or turn it into a external.
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) On my previous PC I topped out at around 200GB used on its hard drive, so when I built this PC I thought "surely I'll never need more than 500 gigs!"... well that was before I had a Steamapps folder that was 200GB and growing.
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