Thinking about getting a new HDD

[agathodaimon]

I currently have a 40-Gig Samsung 7200 RPM HD.
Was looking at some of the newer 10,000 RPM SATA drives, but my main concern is SPEED.
Maybe it's just me, but my hard drive just seems to be getting slower and slower. I can't stand waiting for that thing to load up my programs.
Would I see a noticeable increase in performance if I upgraded to one of those 10,000 rpm sata drives or not?
I suppose I could always try a RAID array, but that's kind of foreign territory for me.
I just want this thing to MOVE FASTER!!

Any thoughts?

[HeadBand]

have you defregged it recently?

if you buy a new one i would much rather have a raid array than a raptor though

[agathodaimon]

yes, I defrag it about every two weeks and I am constantly cleaning all the excess temp files & internet files off.


How difficult is it to set up a raid array?
I haven't dabbled much into that sort of thing yet...

[HeadBand]

its not too difficult...what about your motherboard does it support raid....or sata w/raid

if you don't know what is your model number on the board

[agathodaimon]

It's an MSI KT6 Delta-LSR board, and it has Serial ATA ports, but I'm not sure if it supports RAID or not.

When I set an array up, do I need to reformat anything? Or ghost the image of my current drive onto the new one?
I suppose this is all in the manual for the board (which I don't have on me right now).

[pelicanman]

See www.storagereview.com

[JPMiller]

It may not be your hard drive that is slowing down ... if it has been more than a year since you last formatted and reinstalled windows then there are many factors that can account for your speed loss... have you typed "msconfig" into your "run" option and deselected all extraneous programs running in backround?
you could also download and install XPSmoker, it can do alot to speed up your load up times and speed in general.

[agathodaimon]

I usually end up formatting and reinstalling windows about twice a year.
Actually, just about a week ago, I formatted my HDD that had W2K and installed XP. Still slow....

I don't know, I just feel like it should load things faster. It's probably just as fast as it's always been, it just seems slow after a while.

I think that a RAID configuration might be what I'm looking for... who knows.

[ArcticFox]

Originally posted by agathodaimon
I usually end up formatting and reinstalling windows about twice a year.

You have an eMachines? Just kidding...

Yeah it just depends on your budget. What I'd love to have would be four 74GB Raptors in RAID 0 and a 300GB Maxtor external backup drive. Oh god, I'd be in heaven. But I'd suggest something a little less expensive, like two 36GB Raptors in RAID 0, but you don't have to RAID them if you don't like the idea of all your data being gone when one of the drives dies. That setup would be super fast, and you wouldn't have to buy a RAID card since your mobo has it built-in.

[John Prophet]

try running adaware www.lavasoftusa.com maybe spyware is slowing u down