Hello, i'm planning on purchasing a 1TB hard drive for my desktop. I know i want the fastest SATA-type drive avaliable, but don't know which drive is best? Does anyone recommend any brands and/or models to get?
The Samsung drives are quite fast, but have some compatibility issues. As a sure bet, I'd go with the Seagates for speed. Western Digital Greenpowers are very good for power consumption, heat and noise, but not quite frontline for speed.
The answer to that doesn't really appear set in stone yet. Samsung and Seagate rave about it working wonders but the real world benchmarks don't show a big improvement, and Western Digital, the company I usually buy hard drives from haven't adopted it at all, and their drives are plenty fast enough.
I wouldn't - you will always lose out if you RAID two drives - redundancy with RAID 0, capacity with RAID 1, and access latency with either. The only occasions I suggest using RAID are when using 4+ drives and RAID5/6/10, with a proper RAID card. 'Pretend RAID' as I call it is rarely worth the hassle - I know, I've used it before, it was thoroughly unimpressive.
