Hard disk failure, or a virus, or just about anything that makes you format. If you want speed, go buy an SCSI or SAS card and get 15,000 or go SSD. Mechanical drives are slow.
You also might want to look into a RAMdisk, since you crave speed.
Another thing. If you want speed, buy a controller. SAS cards are getting faster and faster. Sacrifice a PCI-16X port for one and you won't regret it. Hardware raid striping from a controller with 256mb DDR 333 or better is amazing if you're running 15K drives. I've seen it work man. It is awesome. TSTC has a Beowulf cluster that has a SAS card with 10K drives, spanned over 6 drives. It's amazing when it comes to disk activity. It had doom3 installed on it. It went from game to a load screen, the almost immediately back to game.
The fact is that hard drives die more often than anyone would like. And if they don't die, their filesystem ****s out, the MBR goes crazy, or some other data-ending catastrophe hits. It's almost guaranteed to happen in the lifetime of a disc.
With RAID0, you'll lose the contents of both hard drives in one shot.
The other thing about raid0 that hasn't been said is you can change the sector size of the drive and make them smaller. The smaller you make a strip in a sector the more likely the sector is going to go bad with your data on it and more likely the drive is going to die, though you do receive a speed boost from the risk.
If you want to get serious about a RAID card you buy one that is full hardware support, so it has a processor on board and RAM like amish said. Generally now you through a 256MB of 667 onto it. Its really pretty crazy, but those cards almost always give you support for 0,0+1,5,10 and then there is higher but they are fakes and just expand 5 and 10 for more drives, check wikipedia if you don't know what the raids are. In the end you are looking at several hundred dollars for a good Raid card and more down time if the raid fails for some reason and you replace a drive and rebuild.
True raid0 does have drawbacks but it is the best cost:speed solution. Youre going to spend 500 bucks on a decent SSD or more than that even on a nice scsi controler and drive. Get a pair of 74gb raptors in raid0 and get a 500gb external to back up anything encase of a crash.
Actually your best bet cost:speed wise is a 300GB 10K drive, like this one from WD. Knocks the 74gb version out with the Up-A-C-Start combo to select the level you want to play on.
Nah but I think I will just go 2 150GB 10k raptors in raid 0, that will seem probably more than enough speed for me. Then I will reformat my drive in my signature and make it as storage.
You would need 2 of those 300GB tho to put it in raid 0 no? I don't need that much storage, I just need enough for my OS and all the games in my closet. Which probably is 100GB in games.
Adaptec makes one hell of a godstopping scsi card, and I've heard a few good things about the 22527~ series of cards. Sure they're expensive as all get out, but it packs a 16 drive system. Budget cards...I don't know squat.
The northbridge is the primary bus. Everything the processor does, and the memory controller (intel) reside on the NB. Also the PCI-E lanes live in the NB. The SB handles disk interfaces, and other useless stuff.
You want a block on the CPU. The northbridge can go without. You only want to block the northbridge if you increase it's voltage, run it out of spec, yatta. The SB on my board has a passive heatsink that stays room temperature so it's not needed. What I would do though is get one of the zalman northbridge heatsinks. Those work great from what I hear.
What should I look for in a water block? I obviously don't mind paying for a excellent quality block, I have heard stories of some water blocks cracking and frying their systems.
Not much is known at this point. There are specs floating about, but even if you compare them to today's card, there's no telling what optimizations are in place elsewhere on the card or in the drivers. It'd be a wild shot in the dark to determine if the new GTX 260 or GTX 280 will be substantially faster.
Rumor has it that it's not going to be especially revolutionary, like the 8x series was over the 7x series. As is the case with any speculation, though, it's just hearsay. Wait and see?
Even if there are no real core refinements I would expect a decent improvement in High Resolution gaming with AA due to the 1GB GDDR3 and 512-bit memory bus. It's rumored specs looks good on paper, but yeah, we'll just have to wait and see.
It holds my hard drive in a drive bay, is it ok to clean it out with compressed air? The compressed air won't hurt the hard drive will it? Sometimes when I am praying this white frost apears on the parts...
The white frost appears when you invert the can in any fashion, and are spraying the propellant rather than the SF6. The air itself can't hurt the computer, but you should be careful how you angle the can because of that frost.
I usually stand my machine up to dust it. That way I can have a fan blowing parallel to the case to suck away the dust and such. It lives on it's side due to some of the modifications I've had to make to the case.
Well after reading quite a bit on water cooling, theres just so many variables to take into account.
Actually some guy did some testing before hand but when he put it in his system, it leaked and destroyed it. You can over tighten screws on your radiator and bust it, you can not fasten something tight enough, you can over tighten a bracket and puncture a tube, you gotta perform a massive amount of mateniance to get it up and running first go then watch it for leaks. Then always making sure its not corroding or any bacteria is floating around.
Honestly, I think I can do just some mild overclocking on air and be fine, hell I rather lap my cpu and processor then do water cooling.
I can see if you build computers like crazy, and you want to try water cooling but for my first computer.... I think I'll go air for now.
Would you guys consider it a waste to buy the QX9650 and run it on air cooling with some mild overclocking or you think I would benefit more from the Q9450 on air.
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You also might want to look into a RAMdisk, since you crave speed.
Another thing. If you want speed, buy a controller. SAS cards are getting faster and faster. Sacrifice a PCI-16X port for one and you won't regret it. Hardware raid striping from a controller with 256mb DDR 333 or better is amazing if you're running 15K drives. I've seen it work man. It is awesome. TSTC has a Beowulf cluster that has a SAS card with 10K drives, spanned over 6 drives. It's amazing when it comes to disk activity. It had doom3 installed on it. It went from game to a load screen, the almost immediately back to game.
With RAID0, you'll lose the contents of both hard drives in one shot.
If you want to get serious about a RAID card you buy one that is full hardware support, so it has a processor on board and RAM like amish said. Generally now you through a 256MB of 667 onto it. Its really pretty crazy, but those cards almost always give you support for 0,0+1,5,10 and then there is higher but they are fakes and just expand 5 and 10 for more drives, check wikipedia if you don't know what the raids are. In the end you are looking at several hundred dollars for a good Raid card and more down time if the raid fails for some reason and you replace a drive and rebuild.
Nah but I think I will just go 2 150GB 10k raptors in raid 0, that will seem probably more than enough speed for me. Then I will reformat my drive in my signature and make it as storage.
You would need 2 of those 300GB tho to put it in raid 0 no? I don't need that much storage, I just need enough for my OS and all the games in my closet. Which probably is 100GB in games.
If it can handle it then more money for me.
Would you want to cool the south bridge at all? Sounds like it wouldn't get too hot.
Rumor has it that it's not going to be especially revolutionary, like the 8x series was over the 7x series. As is the case with any speculation, though, it's just hearsay. Wait and see?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeForce_9_Series#GeForce_200_Series
Even if there are no real core refinements I would expect a decent improvement in High Resolution gaming with AA due to the 1GB GDDR3 and 512-bit memory bus. It's rumored specs looks good on paper, but yeah, we'll just have to wait and see.
It holds my hard drive in a drive bay, is it ok to clean it out with compressed air? The compressed air won't hurt the hard drive will it? Sometimes when I am praying this white frost apears on the parts...
Actually some guy did some testing before hand but when he put it in his system, it leaked and destroyed it. You can over tighten screws on your radiator and bust it, you can not fasten something tight enough, you can over tighten a bracket and puncture a tube, you gotta perform a massive amount of mateniance to get it up and running first go then watch it for leaks. Then always making sure its not corroding or any bacteria is floating around.
Honestly, I think I can do just some mild overclocking on air and be fine, hell I rather lap my cpu and processor then do water cooling.
I can see if you build computers like crazy, and you want to try water cooling but for my first computer.... I think I'll go air for now.