general hard-drive questions

Hey, how's it going?

The S.M.A.R.T. detector recently went-off on my hard-drive, so I'm in the market for a new one, & I have a few questions.
1st-off, I suppose I should quickly define what type of user I am. I do a lot of heavy 3d animation, large dsl transfers, large full-color posters, & hi-definition video-editting, so my hard-drive gets a lot of use. (Hence, my busted one.) So, with that in mind, here are my questions:

How important are the mili-second seek times? Am I going to notice that big of a difference between 8.9ms & 10ms?

Am I going to notice a difference between an 8mb cache & a 16mb cache?

What are the benefits of a RAID configuration? Can I purchase 1 drive now, then add another for the RAID at a later date, & would it have to be an identical drive?

&, finally, as kind of a separate question, I've used a program to recover data from a dvd in the past, & it worked great. Can I hook-up my now-defunct hard-drive as a slave & use a similar program to recover some of the data from it?

Here's my computer's tech info just in case:
Intel P4 2.2GHz "NorthWood" CPU
ASUS P4S333-M ACPI mother-board
512MB's RAM (Kingston)
80GB IBM DeskStar MIC hard-drive (now-defunct)
GeForce XFX 5200 AGP8x 256MB DDR RAM
& WindowsXP (Home Edition)

Thanx in advance.

 

Hi,

Haven't read your post in depth, but I think it may be a good idea to go to 1gb of RAM. If you are using "big" programs with lots of swapping (in,out,in,out) you need to make sure that all the base information is loaded into the RAM and not accessing the swapfile on your HD (especially if you are running several programs at once). Give the HD as much freedom as possible to just access data.

I use Norton Utilities to set the size of the swap file and put it at the front of the harddrive. That way the drive does not get fragmented and the system has to search all over the drive for the data.

Others might like to comment.

Matt

 

Actually, I started-out with 1GB of RAM, but it was crappy, & recently burned-out. I bought the 512 I currently have to make sure that was the problem. I will be replacing the other 512 soon.

Thanx for the tip of putting the swap-file at the front of the drive. While I'm not a fan of Norton Utilities (despite your resource-saving technique, I just find Norton as a whole to be too demanding) that is a good idea.

 

For me it would depend on price of the higher version. Are the extras worth the extra cost?

You can read about RAID here:
http://www.pcguide.com/topic.html

The utilities of your new hardrive will probably have the option to "copy" the contents of the old drive to the new one. If the new drive's utilities cannot "see" the IBM drive, try using the IBM/Hiatchi utility (in the program Disk Manager, I think). http://www.hitachigst.com/hdd/support/download.htm
Even though SMART is reporting errors, you may well find that it is a very slow decline and the drive may be usable for quite a while yet.
SMART (on my IBM drive) was causing my system to crash during boot. I disabled it and just make sure my backups are up to date.

I don't run Norton Utilities constantly. When I run it I carefully check any changes it wants to make. I don't let it change things "automatically ". Speed Disk and System Optimisation are things I trust.

Matt

 

As far as RAID goes, Fred Langa (The LangaList) in a recent newsletter gives some good information on the pros and cons of RAID.

Personally I'm happy with my own backup regime, and don't want the complications of setting up and maintaining a RAID array. I also tend to agree with Fred's indepth reasons why it's not all it's cracked up to be.

http://www.langa.com/newsletters/2004/2004-09-16.htm

 

Yeah... It doesn't sound like a RAID array or those extras are for me right now. I just need to get my hard-drive & my RAM back.

You know, the same thing is happening to me. I tried disabling it, but it didn't work. I still receive the SMART message, & it still crashes the same. &, actually, SMART was disabled when I 1st began receiving the messages!