quintin3265
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Posts posted by quintin3265
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To those interested, I've now processed (exactly) 2,000 songs and posted them. I estimate that there are an additional 3,500 that have been created in the history of the video game remix community that I have yet to process.
Some of those songs were posted on Overclocked ReMix, and I haven't decided what to do with those yet. While zircon has said to post them, the Internet doesn't need another copy of Overclocked ReMix's canon and that wasn't the purpose of going through all this music.
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When you are considering hard drives for backup purposes, you need to be careful of issues, but you may be worrying about the wrong issues. Here's why.
Between these three types of drives, it doesn't matter whether you use "green" or "black" or "blue" (but "red" is different, see below) for backups. All of these drives are differentiated by speed, price and power consumption, not by storage space. Thus, green drives are clearly superior to blue or black if we just consider those three, because speed is irrelevant for backups.
What you need to worry about is something called an "unrecoverable read error," which tends to happen once in about every 10TB written to green/blue/black drives, which nowadays is unacceptably high. If you are backing up 2TB of data, for example, you have a 10% chance of 512 bytes (one sector) of that data being destroyed by corruption. These errors usually occur as the drives sit in storage over time, because cosmic rays and magnetic fields slowly eat away at the data. I have two zip files from 1997 that I just discovered had succumbed to this error at some point.
A one-in-ten-trillion shot sounds like no big deal, but this is a serious issue because if you are backing up huge files, like a 30GB mail inbox, one byte out of order can destroy all the E-Mail.
The issue is made worse by the issues of compression and encryption. Encrypted files are stored out of order, and sometimes the next block of data depends on the previous block of data being able to be successfully decrypted. If you encrypt or compress a hard drive, and then it develops an unrecoverable read error, all of the data on the drive can be lost.
There are two solutions to this problem: you can buy "enterprise grade" hard drives, such as Seagate Constellations, which are ten times less likely to develop the issue and far faster than standard desktop-grade drives - but they cost twice as much as desktop drives. The second solution is that, every month, you run a program that reads every single byte of every backup drive and compares it to the original. Since unrecoverable read errors are more likely to occur when bytes haven't been read for a long time, reading frequently reduces their likelihood.
Myself, I have 12TB in a RAID 6. Every fourth Saturday and Sunday, I retrieve four cheap 3TB green drives from work and synchronize them to the main array, and then have the computer verify every byte on all backup drives.
But if you don't have a RAID, and you are just copying one drive to another, you don't have that initial redundancy from the RAID. In that case, consider buying an enterprise-grade drive to use as your main drive (since it will be fast, and those drives rarely fail), using the current cheap drive as the backup for an absolute last resort, and reading every file from the backup drive when you perform a backup. Most likely, the enterprise drive will never fail and the desktop drive will be more useful in the case you get infected with a virus.
Note: this solution is expensive. It will likely cost $200. Keep in mind that data recovery is more expensive, and desktop drives are failure-prone. Believe it or not, I had one of the desktop drives fail WHILE IT WAS MAKING A BACKUP - and Kroll Ontrack wanted $6,000 to recover it. I was able to do it myself by teaching myself about NTFS from the ground up, losing four entire Saturdays and Sundays and still paying $1,700.
Remember, people think nothing of paying $500-1000/yr for expensive cameras or cell phone service with cameras and videos - and then after ten years, they place their $10,000 worth of videos on a $50 backup drive (if they back up at all) and wonder why they lost all the pictures.
OK, another hard drive question:If a drive is only going to be used as a storage duplicate of another drive for backup purposes, are the those cheaper "green" drives good enough for that? What about video playback off of them?
I'm not going to be installing programs or anything of that sort on them, I know they're much slower than the 7200 drives, but those 7200 drives are also so much more expensive. I'm looking at the Samsung EcoGreen F4, WD Caviar Green and Seagate Barracuda Green specifically right now and I'd like an opinion. I'd rather not spend a huge amount of money on top-performance if I don't actually need top performance.
Also, are the 3TB drives worth it right now? I'm trying to decide on whether I should instead get two 3TB drives instead of three 2TB drives.
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http://kotaku.com/5941793/valve-is-bringing-steam-to-your-tv-today-watch-out-consoles
The comments bring up a lot of good points about the logistical challenges involved in getting the best experience from a living room PC, including
1) Still have to deal with all the regular PC hassles like driver updates, incompatibility, upgrading hardware, finding graphics settings that are tolerable to look at while still being playable, etc.
2) The noise/lack of privacy from being in a main activity area.
3) PC games are designed to be played with the screen a couple feet from your face, so often text and smaller details become indistinguishable at a greater distance.
4) TVs actually have slightly different resolutions from PC displays, so overscan becomes an issue.
5) And this one is from personal experience: you can't get surround sound to your existing home theater receiver via your motherboard's SPDIF. It only supports stereo PCM. So either you need to have a set of PC surround speakers alongside your home theater ones, or you need to buy a sound card that will encode the output to a Dolby or DTS signal.
The issue with receivers did used to be a problem in the past, but with modern receivers, it is no longer a barrier. Almost any receiver sold after 2008 supports HDMI input, which can take 7.1/24/96 in raw PCM. HDMI 1.4a can take 3D along with Master Audio or TrueHD. Even low-end $200 models now include these features.
I have a PC running Windows 8 connected to an Onkyo TX-NR1009 and it works great. I can play DVD-Audio discs and watch 3D movies no problem. The only issue is that you need to buy something called an "HDMI detective," or else AMD's and Nvidia's drivers reset the display when you turn the TV off. If you want the PC to run all the time to host a server for web development, as I do, you need to buy one of these devices so that you don't have to restart every time you turn on the TV.
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Do games do split-screen anymore? I miss those days, and with HDTVs nowadays, it seems like SSMP would be less terrible.
I think that the reason split-screen has gone downhill is because it wasn't that good of an idea to begin with. It sounds like a great idea in theory, but it's nearly impossible to get four people together to play a game for even half an hour without someone getting bored or getting distracted by his phone or leaving. Has anyone on this thread been able to get people together to play a splitscreen game together in the last ten years, outside of giant venues like MAGfest?
The Internet replaced split-screen because it was a better solution from the start. You don't have to worry about coordinating schedules because there is always someone available to take over if someone quits.
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These don't happen to be the same people who complain they haven't touched their Wii since they beat the last Zelda/Mario game?
There's a great article on the Internet about Target's marketing practices. They did some research and determined that there are "life events" where people change their buying habits and are willing to try new brands; otherwise, it is difficult to get people to change brands. Two of these life events are moving to a new city and pregnancy. Their algorithms at predicting pregnancy got so good that they saturated teenagers with marketing materials based on their purchasing habits when the algorithm predicted these kids were pregnant. These teenagers' parents threatened to sue - that is, until they found out that their kids actually were pregnant.
I'd wager that the Ouya will face a similar dilemma. These people who haven't picked up the Wii since they beat Mario are people who bought the Wii solely for Mario. They played Mario because they know that all 20 or 30 iterations of Mario have been generally good games, and now they're in their 40s still playing the games they were introduced to as teenagers. These people are not willing to change consoles without a significant life event, like getting married or having kids, changes their financial statuses or opens their minds to new possibilities.
The real market for the Ouya is going to be limited to young people, who don't have preferences made up yet, and to developers. Developers aren't going to be buying others' games, because they are programming their own, so we ignore them here. And I think that with the young people, playing video games is going out of fashion. The bored 15-year-old nowadays doesn't go home and play video games like the 15-year-old did 15 years ago; now, the 15-year-old goes home and does "social networking" on facebook and by sending text messages.
People are missing that the Ouya isn't competing against other consoles. The older market is set, and in the younger market they're competing against things like text messaging. At an incredible 1300 (!) text messages a month, the low-income, young, most open-minded market is too preoccupied by "social" activities to play games on the Ouya.
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while there is ingrained issues in the system as it is now, there is a reason that game development is a meritocracy. and it SHOULD be a meritocracy. making games costs money, even small games. nobody (including developers themselves) wants to make a game that nobody likes, because it's a waste of the developers' time and money. if you can't produce a quality game it probably means you should keep educating yourself until you can. not that someone needs to make you a cheap, easy-to-develop-for system to put it on.
edit: gollgagh nice one. mentally imagining wii fit and a keyboard made me giggle. and kind of reminded me of track and field for nes
This is a misleading argument. Making games doesn't cost money. I could decide to go home on Friday night and start work on a game written in Java, using MySQL as a backend, and Javascript as a client-side tool for facebook. Or, I could start with C++ and compile my 3D game using openGL. I could do all of this on a cheap netbook you can buy on eBay for less than $50.
The costs are the opportunity cost of what developers are not doing instead. If I'm writing a game, I'm not making money at a normal job. I'm "paying" by losing the opportunity to make money elsewhere. Thus, money is lost even though it costs nothing in parts to actually write a game.
Frankly, I'm surprised every time I look at the number of iPhone or Android apps. There are so many software development jobs out there that I don't understand why anyone in today's environment who knows how to write games would waste their days writing low-quality indie games that have a 1 in 1000 chance of success. They could get a job making $60-80k/yr with health insurance instead.
The market is flooded with games simply because it's so cheap to create them. The Ouya will be so inundated with indie games that few, if any, of them will make as much for the developer as a standard software developer position could earn.
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I would agree with your dislike of mashing "X," but I don't agree that Final Fantasy XIII-2 involved much mashing of X because it was more difficult than the first installment.
I think you mistake "mashing X" with being "too easy." Games that are too easy often have great battle systems, but the player just ignores all that great stuff because it's so complicated and unnecessary to win such an easy game. The first Final Fantasy XIII was too easy, and so you could win most battles by mashing X even if you didn't really know how to play the game.
By the way, if you think that these games are too easy, play Tales of Graces f, and set the difficulty to Chaos mode. It's the only RPG I've ever played where the game is actually difficult enough that you need to use every last bit of the battle system to win battles. I had to replay some battles 30 or 40 times, and have gotten to the point where the boss needs one hit to die after an hour of battling, but I have all life bottles used up, one character alive, a huge attack on the way, and less than 100HP remaining.
That's a game you can win by mashing X in Easy mode. In Chaos mode, there are times like the one above where you pause and spend minutes trying to figure out the exact sequence to save the battle quickly enough before you die. The difference with mashing X is all about difficulty in any game.
Personally I wasn't a fan of XIII's gameplay OR story.I'll admit, mashing X is something I tend to do in FF games eventually, but normally I do it near end-game to grind when I just slam on attack. It's not something I want for my entire game.
In XIII battles are won and lost pre-battle where if you have the wrong paradigms you'll just lose and the rest is mashing X. Sure you can input attacks one by one, but the game was designed arounf autobattle and I feel I get outpaced quickly if I try and think about it. Literally the only time I did is when I was synergising because the synergist AI doesn't have a clue what is good for party members.
When I simply mash a button or two for an entire game it just gets dull. FFXIII-2's final boss was beat almost exclusively with X since I went Medic Rav Commando.
It's not that I hate all the characters of XIII neither, on reflection most of them are ok, I like Vanille, Sazh, Fang and Snow. It's just the game focuses so hard on Lightning who I hated that it just gets dull. The game also hardly explains who anyone is unless you are willing to stop and read the codec every 5 minutes. The first time I found out Jill's name is in the cutscene where she's mentioned by name and killed and yet the flashbacks kept trying to make her out like a big character.
The plot also suffers yes, so they want us to destroy this thing but we have no choice because we'll become monsters so lets just shout and bawl until it seems like we are rebelling but in the end we'll just destroy that thing anyway and then everyone will survive despite everything being coated in fire and then crystallised.
So yes XIII I felt was a bit awful, X on the otherhand is amazing. It's linear to the point that it tells the story but it gives you optional dungeons and areas and a proper craft system and a minigame that compels you to travel the world looking for players. It's sidequests involve going over the world and to revisit temples, it's secrets are off the beaten path and reward you handsomely. Remember the Calm Lands? It has TWO secret temples with sidequests and rewards branching off of them and a whole racing minigame AND a Capture outpost with a monster arena!
A more direct comparison is Gran Pulse, a big field with branching areas (granted the only bit in the game) but the difference is in the content. For it's sheer size there's just not much worthwhile to do. You can go about treasure hunting on a chocobo or you can complete a bunch of battle-missions in the same few areas for limited rewards. There's not enough reason to engage with the world in XIII. Endgame in X you can go anywhere, and even unlock new places and the game gives you good reason to go to these places.
That's probably why X feels so much less linear than XIII. At the end of it we feel compelled to explore the world because there is more to find. With XIII by the time you've reached Eden you are more or less done.
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I apparently don't have this song. I did a search for Final Fantasy 5 music and I discovered two issues: first, many of the files are *.mid and *.it (impulse tracker) files. Second, in the 90s, a large proportion of systems still used 8.3 filenames, so the songs have filenames like "ff4ahwtw.mp3."
I'm still going to download the entire Overclocked ReMix canon and run Similarity against them, and then I can put online the ones that don't have a 100% match. I should have time on the weekend of August 25-26 to write a program to bulk add those to Game Remixes, so make sure to check back then.
Holy crap that sounds like an amazing collection. At any rate, it looks like I don't have to heckle you about it because I found the remix on my old laptop that I haven't touched in years.Evidently it's an old VGMix called Ahead On Our Way by Ryu7x (Michael Drosos). I don't believe it was ever uploaded to Ocremix.
By the way....thanks for everyone's support. Although I don't know a lot about music, everyone has been ridiculously kind and I really want to stick around
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I haven't posted here in several years, but I got an E-Mail saying that this thread had been modified, and I probably have this song you're looking for.
I have about 20k video game remixes on an array of hard drives, as early as 1996. I never got around to uploading them in 2009. Some of these songs may be the only copies that exist. Your post convinced me that I need to get these online if only to prevent culture from being lost, as there may even be artists who no longer have these songs through drive failures.
A lot of it is probably duplicates of stuff from Overclocked ReMix or VGMix, but other stuff is unique. Someone familiar with the Overclocked ReMix canon could be of significant help in determining which music is valuable and which is already online elsewhere. If someone is interested in assisting me in attempting to identify some of this music by listening to it, please send a reply.
Thanks for the link, although I checked it out and the mix I'm looking for sadly wasn't there
I really appreciate your help, though.Edit: I believe it existed sometime around 2003 or 2004, maybe 2005. It could have also been a FF 5 mix of the main theme (since they're essentially the same song). That doesn't narrow it down at all, at any rate.
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Hi,
Voting for the remixsite Composition Combat is now underway. The competition challenged contestants to write a main theme for a fictional fantasy/sci-fi game. The winner of the challenge will receive $500, and the runner up will receive a free video game.
Please take the time to listen to some incredible music and to vote for your favorites. The prizes will be awarded entirely by community vote. Voting is simple and your vote can be registered simply by clicking on the rating you wish to grant to a song. One vote per person is allowed, and you may vote for as few or as many songs as you would like. Since more votes will ensure a fairer and more accurate result, I encourage everyone to spend a few minutes and offer your opinions.
You may also, but are not required to, post a detailed review along with your rating to provide the contestants with more direct feedback. Note that the currently displayed ratings are padded with dummy votes nightly to randomize the standings; these dummy votes will not be counted in the final tally. The displayed ratings do not represent the actual rank of the contestants.
Visit here for a list of songs entered into the challenge. Good luck to all the competitors and I hope you'll stop by to help us choose the winner!
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This movie sounds awesome. At least, it better be, considering they spent $237m on producing it.
I didn't have any complaints about the 3D scenes in, for example, Harry Potter V. I thought they were amazing. If people are saying that these scenes are even more incredible, then there has to be something to it.
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The reason is that the software, hardware and various other things are expensive, hard to come by or not supported. I would absolutely love to do an entire album in 5.1, but Ableton doesnt support 5.1, my audio interface doesnt support 5.1, and i dont have 3 other good monitors to mix it. Maybe in the future, but for me thats about a $2000 upgrade...
Not to mention most people dont have wonderful 5.1 surround systems, so spending all that time and having maybe 50 people be able to fully appreciate it is somewhat hard to try and swing the extra moolah on that stuff.
While hardware can be expensive, listening equipment is not. You can buy extremely high-quality surround headphones for just $25. Look for a brand called "Listen to Believe." The headphones have a simple USB plug - you plug it in and then you can listen to 5.1 music. Because the speakers are closer to your ears, I've found that these headphones can actually sound better than a huge expensive speaker system.
And the headphones do actually improve the quality of stereo remixes. If you listen to "Rhymes with Elixir" by The Scuba Divers/Liontamer using these headphones, and set the bass redirection to 60Hz, Pro Logic II algorithms can easily separate the voice of the male and female rappers (the center channel) from the instruments (left, right, and surround left/right) and the booming drums (sub). The effect is awesome and that song isn't even written in 5.1.
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Recently, I've been looking around to see if I can locate any surround remixes of game music. 5.1 music in other genres is becoming more common, and you can find DTS cds and even 7.1 TrueHD Blu-rays, but I have yet to find a single video game song that someone has remixed into 5.1 surround, even if the original was in surround.
Is anyone aware of any mixes like this?
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Excellent song. The only thing I think could be improved is perhaps to make it shorter. The one part that bothered me was around 2:15 or so, when things slowed down and there was little melody. I just wanted things to get going again and to move on.
But then again, that's the way techno is - really, really long, and I am sure there are those who would say it's part of the genre. Either way, the song is great and hopefully it will be selected.
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Personally, although I have every FF album on my PC up to 11 Online without the expansions, IV isn't that great of an album musically. Nobuo matured as he created the music for V, VI and VII in my opinion. Then again, I can't say a bad thing about VII at all... the spin offs, yeah I won't go into them...
But. I have enjoyed this album. It is worth downloading to be sure. Still, nothing on VoTL for me. That and Project Chaos are my favourite two Projects.
I agree with this comment. The remixers did a good job with what they had. The problem I had is that there just wasn't enough source material for all the tracks that were on the remix album. Look at the VGMdb - the remix album is almost three times as long as the original is.
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Sounds exactly like what happened to me quite a while back. Mine turned out to be a bad card (bad ram on the card, probably). If you want, you could get a program to underclock the video card settings, and then run artifact tests to see if they stop. This allowed me to use the card for quite a while longer without artifacts until I could get around to replacing it.
If you are going to do it, I'd recommend lowering the clock by small increments, and then running artifact tests each time to see when they stop.
Every time I've had cards or processors break, the clock speed seems to cause the problem, so I agree with this underclocking idea.
But if you go on eBay, you can get another card for as low as $10-20. You'll probably waste four hours working on this problem, and it may break again two weeks from now. Even if you make minimum wage, you'd easily make more than $20 in 4 hours. Unless you're extremely poor, I'd say to nott waste any more time here and just order a new card to be done with it.
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I don't care about achievements, they're nice, but they don't add anything to me anymore. And I'll RARELY complete the ridiculous amount of stuff to do in the games unless I REALLY, want too (Hint, that won't be often)
Here here!
I play Halo 3 a lot and there are so many people who cheat to get achievements and rankings (which are basically the same thing) that it's ridiculous. Why would you want to waste time when you're not actually playing the game?
Oh, and that assumes that the achievement points will always be there. Bungie constantly resets Halo's ranks for "equality." Who knows if Microsoft will do that for the Xbox 720? Then thousands of hours of "hard work" are down the tubes.
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Yeah, back when I played ddr a lot it got to the point where sometimes I would close my eyes and just see arrows. Weird!
Also, sometimes after playing computer games a lot, I'll go back to real world and everything will look grainy and pixelated. weird...
DDR is awesome. After I got good at DDR, I joined a swing dance club around the same time. But at first I had to break myself out of the DDR frame because there were no arrows on the ground to guide the steps. It's harder than you would think. With DDR, you start looking at dance as a set of mathematical steps that are preselected, and it's not like real dance at all.
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I recently saw similar threads to this one at the VGMdb forums (http://www.vgmdb.net/forums). There were quite a few posts discussing how to procure music online and how not to be cheated. Unfortunately, however, the conclusion was that, for some music, it's just impossible to find legitimate copies.
You might want to read or ask over there before you buy.
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You didn't say, but which 2 did you only like?
I agree with the assessment that most of the songs strayed too far from the source material. I kept waiting for some arrangement to hit the original out of the park, but that didn't come.
One weakness of OverClocked albums is that many artists contribute to them. In one way, that's great, because lots of tracks are submitted, but it also creates so many different styles that the album lacks cohesiveness.
This album contains great music, worthy of listening to many times, but I don't think it's as strong when considered as a story, or when considered as remixes of FF4 songs.
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That's kinda weird. It would be nicer if you could just host the file without having it rated by the host...
Maybe I wasn't clear - I apologize. When I said "rated," I meant so that people on remixSite can rate the song and discuss it. I or the hosting company doesn't rate or censor songs in any way.
As to bandwidth issues, the site is far, far under its bandwidth allotment. I'm not worried about bandwidth. The reason that the details page should be referenced isn't to save bandwidth but rather to build a community. When toplists go live next week, for instance, there won't be much use for them if nobody has rated songs. For now, post as many songs as you can, and yes, you have full control and can permanently delete the files if you choose.
So in short, don't worry about the bandwidth or the possible deletion issues. If they become a problem, I'll deal with them when the time comes
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I wanted to suggest that remixSite (http://www.remixsite.org/) offers free posting, hosting, and streaming of video game songs. Registration is required to upload music, but anyone can listen without registration.
Features include:
- 100MB upload limit per song
- All valid music files accepted, including MP3, WAV, OGG, FLAC, WMA, and others
- Files in MP3 format can be streamed; all files can be downloaded
- Upload a new version in place of your old one and track changes
- Determine exactly how many people listened to your song
There is no problem with posting links and debating songs here, as long as the link you post goes to the song's details page so that people can rate it at remixSite as well. For WIPs, mark the "work in progress" checkbox in the upload form.
An example of a link to a work in progress is http://www.remixsite.org/song/details/9-v2-Binweasel-Take_a_Step. This particular WIP was revised once, and you can listen to both versions by following the appropriate links.
- 100MB upload limit per song
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Before I make final plans and get bus tickets, anyone know about how long the show runs?
The show in Grand Rapids lasted 2 hours and 2 minutes.
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I don't have a car.
Anyway I don't really expect to be doing any filming. Rear Orchestra may not be the best vantage point but in terms of is it a good place to sit...that is the part I worry about most.
ADDITIONAL EDITING:
There's a box office on-site, right? Good.
There is a box office there, but the Grand Rapids show sold out a few hours before the concert.
I think you misinterpreted my post. I didn't mean that you were filming; I meant that they are showing video from the Final Fantasy games on a huge screen that's hung from the ceiling. If you can't see the screen, then you're missing a good part of the experience.
I want to build you a computer
in General Discussion
Posted · Edited by quintin3265
This is VERY IMPORTANT but is actually incorrect, or sort of. I made those letters big because few people realize the differences between RAID systems. There are three types of RAID:
1. Hardware RAID (Excellent): A PCI card that plugs into a motherboard, which the drives then connect to. The card takes care of all the RAID functions, even when the OS isn't booted. Windows 7 and older systems don't even detect that there are more than one disk behind the card. These are like mini-computers, with their own CPU and memory. To move drives to a different computer, you take out the card and drives, plug it into a new computer, and there is no change. You can go from Windows to a Mac or Mac to Linux with no issues.
2. Software RAID (OK, but Obsolete): Windows 7 or lower, or Windows 2008 R2 or lower, performs all the computations using the CPU. You can't use the drive outside of Windows, you can't boot from the drive, and it is slower because a percentage of the CPU is dedicated to performing computations. With Windows, as long as you take all drives to another computer, it recognizes the array in any order.
3. Firmware RAID (VERY BAD, AVOID AT ALL COSTS): Available on almost all motherboards nowadays. This segment has been taken over by Intel Matrix RAID. This is buggy and can be dependent on drive order and motherboard type and motherboard firmware version. There is metadata stored in the last sector of each disk, and if you change a few bytes, the array is marked as failed (even though no data is lost). The size of the disk reported to Windows is smaller than the actual size because the metadata sectors are removed. Using "3TB" disks from different manufacturers might not work because a "3TB" disk from Seagate might have 5860000000 sectors and a "3TB" disk from WD might have 586000125 sectors. Uses no less CPU than software RAID and cannot be optimized by the operating system. If the motherboard fails, the data is not lost, but you need to send out for data recovery, which is about $5000.
The bottom line is that if you can afford it, buy hardware RAID. I spent $400 on a MegaRAID card, but it has had zero issues for six months - the data is worth more than that.
If you can't afford hardware RAID, then buy a copy of Windows 8, which is only $39.99. Windows 8, which will be released in 26 days, has a brand new feature called "storage spaces," which replaces software RAID. It allows you to connect any number of disks, of any size, speed, and type, and allows you to specify the number of copies of parity data stored across the disks. You can create a storage space where one drive, or two drives, or zero drives (!) can fail before all the data on the array is lost. Windows performs automatic maintenance like consistency checks to ensure the data never gets corrupted.
Conclusion: if you have money, hardware raid is the most reliable and is faster than one disk. If you don't, buy Windows 8 and suffer some speed penalty, but have working storage spaces that are compatible with any 8 or higher (or Server 2012 or higher) computer, and which are the next generation after RAID.