raid

Hi Peter


To save a hell of alot of typing these links will help

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID
http://www.acnc.com/raid.html

Basically its 2 or more HDDs linked together to either add a bit of speed in Striping (Raid0) the disks together or Mirroring (Raid1) to help backup data automatically. Alot of folk who tinker with PCs tend to go the Raid0 (Striping) route, I have dont this for years and it does add some speed in loading Windows to loading your Apps, but it doesnt have any backup redundancy do if one disk fails or corrupts the whole array is dead, which is why I use Acronis to backup the Raid0 array (2x WD Raptors) to a 3rd 1TB HDD incase of this, not that in 10yrs it has failed yet.

There are many forms of Raid (see the links above) not that Dell will offer most, they are likely to offer Raid0, Raid1 or Raid0+1 possibly.

What Array formats are they offering is it Raid0 or Raid1?

 

Hi Peter

Yes Raid may not be the option for you as you have a backup drive and routine already in place in your current PC and that works well and will serve to work well on Windows 7.

I would be tempted if this is a desktop PC you are getting to get a smaller say 300GB HDD to have Windows and your apps installed and then a larger 1TB or 640GB drive for internal storage of important files etc so you can get to them easily, saves using an external (I do it this way in having a 160GB HDD for Windows and apps and well a 400GB and a 1TB drive for backups, download and saved files, saves keeping them on an OS drive incase that buggers up!)

Dell XPS good PCs, Win7 pro or home premium is good in 64bit, the i5 CPUs great processor, and 8gb ram (dunno if this would be overkill for what you need, maybe 4-6GB is ample) and onboard sound these days is really good, unless you are an audiophile and love playing music via your PC, as for graphics, then this would be determined by the types of games you would like to play or if you like graphic design or image editing.

 

Hi Peter

6GB is what I run in my main desktop PC at present and Widnows 7 x64 Ultimate runs perfectly fine, no apps and I do run the likes of Photoshop CS5 and Lightroom dont run out of ram with very large images I work with.

Onboard sound comes with the motherboard and is a default with all OEM PCs these days, you can add an optional Audio card if you like, but personally onboard audio has come far these days and is very good quality sound, just need to with any audio options be it onboard or addon card to get good quality speakers.

A mid range card would be good, but when you have a model in mind link us to the DELL page and we can look over the specs for you and give you some comments.