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Should I max out my hard drive speed for home media storage?
Tuesday, June 9, 2009 / Hardware, Networking
Jacob,
I’m ready to move to a Power Mac. I’m largely an Adobe Suite / MS Office / Internet user and a gamer. Here is the configuration I’m looking at and I’d appreciate your recommendations.
2.9 GHZ
4 GB RAM
ATI Radeon HD 3850 or 3870
PRI Drive: 320GB Serial ATA 7200 RPM drive
SEC Drive: 1 Terebyte
2x 16x double-layer SuperDrive
Bluetooth 2.0+EDR
I don’t plan on using an Apple Keyboard or Apple Mighty Mouse. If I’m going to use my computer as the home media center, should I max out drive storage and go with faster hard drive speeds?
Thanks!
Michael
For the best boot times and fastest game loads, I would recommend that you make your primary drive a 300GB 15k rpm SAS drive. That should make data and applications zip on that system, the hard drive is often the bottleneck of a computer. Your second and third drives can be 1TB in size. Make them a RAID 1 to protect your data if you have no other backup strategy. Remember Time Machine only backs up the primary boot drive.
Hope that helps,
Jacob
