Need to upgrade hard drive soon. What's best performance boost?

CaxusCaxus
edited December 2006 in Hardware
I'm thinking of upgrading my hard drive soon because of space but also want to boost my performance while i'm at it. I have an 80 gig seagate 7200 rpm with an 8mb cache. It's been a while since i researched the whole raid 0 thing but I seem to remember coming to the conclusion that it didn't help games that much. Should I just buy a single raptor and not mess with raid 0? Is the performance difference noticable?

Comments

  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    All in all you will be better off with a single drive that has a low seek time. The newest generation of Raptors are quite good at this. I have run RAID-0 with up to 6 drives and found that while my benches looked impressive the set-up did nothing for real world performance with the exception of very large files like video editing and such. On the other side I also found that the seek times either stayed the same or got worse and the ever so tiny increase in very small transfers were more than offset by the seek and latency issuses associated with an IDE RAID-0 set-up (SATA still performs the same as IDE for all practical puposes). Your OS and most things work on more small and extremely small transfers than anything else so that is where you need to concentrate if you wish to improve performance. You could try putting your games on a 2 drive RAID-0 with nothing else as it may help with load times for todays more demanding games. Also remember that anything you wish to keep should never be on a RAID array without sufficient backup!

    I have now switched to using the fastest drive for my OS and anything associated withit, another drive for my apps and another for file storage. This has given me the best real world performance I have ever experienced. It allows the heads of each drive to work independently for their exclusive purpose and never have a conflict as the where to go like in a single drive system or even any RAID-0 array.
  • CaxusCaxus
    edited December 2006
    What if I were to do that with only 2 drives? Should I put OS and file storage on one and programs on the other? Or OS on one and everything else on the other?
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    Caxus wrote:
    What if I were to do that with only 2 drives? Should I put OS and file storage on one and programs on the other? Or OS on one and everything else on the other?
    I say it would depend on what kind of files and how often you access them. Most should go on the second drive while files not used often could go on the OS drive. Just remember to keep your drives to less than 75% capacity as performance really falls off at that point. ;)
  • CaxusCaxus
    edited December 2006
    In that case it sounds like I should get a 40gb raptor for just the OS and then a second 160 for everything else. I'm not familiar with how often windows accesses its own files but i'm assuming it does whenever you do pretty much anything. Where would be the best place to put the page file in this setup? On the OS drive or the apps drive?
  • Mt_GoatMt_Goat Head Cheezy Knob Pflugerville (north of Austin) Icrontian
    edited December 2006
    Keep the swap file in Windows on the same drive unless you have another fast drive to keep it on with nothing else!
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