500Gb Hard Drives

[Aprox]

On a similar note, whats the best HDD setup to go for these days on a gaming pc?

I would imagine a WD Raptor 150 by itself or setup in raid 0 is probably the best way to go. Those perpendicular drives perform really nice I hear, hold more and cost less but still not quite as fast as a raptor.

 

[zapoqx]

You're living in Cloud Cuckoo Land.
I'm a IT admin. I use Seagate Enterprise drives. These are designed to be that little bit better in quality and reliability.

Don't rely on sound to tell you a drive is faulty.
Switch on the SMART function in your BIOS and run a SMART program in the background.

Use a free SMART XP program like 'HDD Health'. This program even tells you when a drive is estimated to die on you! It works out the date from the abuse it gets! The longer it's ran, the more accurate it gets.
See http://www.panterasoft.com/

Hence, I never said I was going to college for becoming that. Just becoming a programmer. Just need to make sure I know enough of whats going on with my system.

 

[profquatermass]

Do you use SMART at home? I want to know how much it affects gaming performance.

I've used SMART for years at home.
I can't say how it affects game performance as I've no reason to think that it should.
Why don't you read up about it? I often play Half-Life 2. Seems ok to me.

All hard drives fail, it's an inevitable event. When you've lost a years of data because you've not done backups then you'll know the value of doing backups.

(I also do regular CHKDSK /F and defragment my drives every 2 weeks).

I backup my c:\ and my game drive once a week.
Plenty of free utilities that do this. You just need to know where to look.
I even wrote one myself.

I even take my CDs and make ISO images of them using Imgburn or CloneCD (as they get scratched over time) and store these on USB storage devices (storage is so cheap these days).
With USB 3 (480Mb/s to 4800Mb/s) about to come out, speed of access will no longer be an issue either.