Harddrive Question
 

Hi all

I am after a new HD basically my 80gb Sata just isn't big enough for all the games app's and documents I have.

Now I have toyed with a 200gb harddrive of which would be big enough, and using the 80gb sata for the apps only.

However a question popped into my head last night.

What if I was to buy a raptor 10k RPM harddrive and use that for my apps and use the 80gb Maxtor SATA HD as the slave for documents ( this would be big enough ).

Would I see a performance gain using the raptor configuration over the traditional small app HD and huge backup HD?

My budget for a new harddrive is strictly under £60.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Firstly, forget the terminology "master" and "slave" because that is null and void with SATA. Yes you would see a performance gain from running Windows and Apps off of a 10,000RPM Drive simply because the mechanical speed of the drive is a huge bottleneck in the speed you can pull data from it.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

The raptor is a good drive and you will see in increase in performance if you get one but I haven't seen one available that would be within your budget. Scan, for example, do the 36Gb version for £75.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

If the gain is enough I will take it out of my booze money :eek:

So if I bung up the cash and went for a raptor drive I'm looking at a performance kick...

Sounds like sold to me :D

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Yes definitely, i'd like to get myself one eventually mmmmmmmmmmmm

Re: Harddrive Question
 

While it is true that they are faster I wouldnt really say the speed is worth the expense, you could get a nice 250GB 7,200RPM 16mb cache SATAII drive for cheaper. This would be slower but not noticably.
If I had this I would partion the 250GB into a 40GB boot partition with the remainder for data backup, then use the 80GB you currently have as a secondary backup and also have your windows pagefile on it.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

My Raptor just died and im on a standard sata II now with my os and ive hardly noticed the difference. I would keep your os and apps on the 80 and install games and larger more intensive programs to the larger drive.
Reasoning when you run a program it accesses the hard drive if the os is running on the same drive and something runs then the hard drive is trying to read write and read more often so it causes a bottleneck. Running more labour intensive apps off a second drive will clear this bottleneck. Partitioning a large drive and having the os on a smaller partition is compounding the bottlenect imo.
I run a large number of drives each have there own purpose so the need to read and write to the same drive twiceor more at the same time in normal use isnt a problem for me

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Right the 80gb is getting more and more noisy so I am thinking it's on its way out.

So my plan of action is this.

I shall buy one 160gb harddrive (sata) for the apps and windows, and another larger ( 250gb +) (sata) for my games and documents.

Now I hope to do this for about £200 perhaps...do I even have a hope in hell in getting a good branded reliable harddrive set for this?

Re: Harddrive Question
 

If you really want to risk it and get better performance than them noisy ugly raptors then why dont you raid-0 a couple of ide or SATA drives.

I recogn my RAID0 ide setup on one of my windoze machines will give a single raptor a run for it's money any day.

BTW I semi agree with Zing but heavy usage app typically only have their hard drive hit when they load up after which theres not much disk usage unless your doing DV capture or DVD ripping but then again you can specify where you want to dump your files ie > non OS drive.

Overall the way I feel is that the bottleneck is windoze it's just a sh**e OS you really need to house keep it by cleaning the registry pruning/defragging, checking the pagefile etc etc every 3 months or so. So much so the way I use my machines are 1 desktop machine for mail, development, PIM etc : The essentials. Heavy disk IO etc I have a dedicated machines for.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

I am after staying very far away from Raid configurations.

The twin HD idea is one I like although I think I may go for apps/os/games on the main HD, and documents and swap space on the slave HD.

---------- Post added at 13:36 ---------- Previous post was at 13:35 ----------

I have a 80gb SATA HD now, how much swap space should I set it for? since Windows is in control right now.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Zing you using i-ram or something similar yet :)

http://www.techreport.com/reviews/20...m/index.x?pg=1

There is an alternative one which uses DDR2 but I dont have the link..

Get out ya wallet you know u wanna :)

ps In terms of performance the fastest machine I have also happens to be the lowest spec - Interesting thought huh

---------- Post added at 13:40 ---------- Previous post was at 13:38 ----------

Errr you mean OS/swap on master drive and apps/download apps on the other.

Basically the idea is not to have much writing happening on the OS drive (other than for swap).

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Could explain the ten tonne of problems that I am having.

To be blunt just how much performance loss is there when using a single HD configuration? in games like HL2, BF2 etc

Re: Harddrive Question
 

dude you can get 3 hard disks and possible spare for an 80 gig on top for 200 quid

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Decent branded, this Maxtor 80gb one is bloody noisy.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

pretty much any brand you want

Re: Harddrive Question
 

No such thing as a decent brand really mate, good and bad apples in all brands. For example Maxtors are actually my second favorite since they are so quiet and fast (Seagates are number 1 because they are better on both counts in my experience). yet you have a noisey Maxtor so you think differently of the brand range.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Plus Seagate == Maxtor now

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Interesting, what do you all make of Hitacthi *sp*, and Western Digital?

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Just as a side note have you considered your drive simply might have worked loose and its that your hearing? maybe fit it into 5.25 inch with some dampening

Re: Harddrive Question
 

We only just fitted it into this chassis, the noise is like a old p1 HD lol, very grindy sort of noise when being read.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

My Maxtor is the same. Tried AMSET but because it's on sata it didn't pick it up. Maxtor support were as useful as the proverbial chocolate fireguard, considering the gumph about Amset said that if the drive wasn't detected to contact them for help!

Re: Harddrive Question
 

This is the second Maxtor drive which just after 12month gets noisy and soon after dies.

I may go down the three HD route all about 200gb if I can, and follow the path Zingle mentioned previously.

Just cost and time, I've an house to get decorated and sorted but my hobbies are gaming and when I come and sit down get into a good game on Halo only for the HD to be grinding away then a lock up....

Today done a full re-format and made sure I created a new partition and did the longer format to ntfs, since I've got back into windows its alot quicker, but still noisy

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Maxtors have come a long way and are suprisingly quiet these days : I too used to avoid them like the plague until recently when I had a failure on my co located server.

I was running the IBM deathstars LOL and they are so bad that even lemmings cant keep up with their downtime. Was very lucky to have had them running in the machine for 5 years but one of them died just recently rushed to the data centre and to my suprise the buddy I rent the space from actually had a pack of like 20 odd maxtors - interesting -and this guy is like 100x more techie than me.

Anyway I popped a maxtor in there so far so good ...

Just logged on and am seeing errors on the second old IBM deathstar grrrrrrrrrrrrrr.....

root enigma:~> uptime
11:56pm up 41 days, 6:15, 1 user, load average: 2.03, 2.05, 2.04
root enigma:~> grep error /var/log/messages
Oct 15 10:00:10 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 10:00:10 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 10:46:34 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 14:00:07 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 14:00:07 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 15:00:10 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 16:00:06 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }
Oct 15 17:00:09 enigma kernel: hda: dma_intr: error=0x84 { DriveStatusError BadCRC }


feck I cant be assed to go and fix it : I just let it break and then go :)

ps I still prefer seagates

Re: Harddrive Question
 

I think I shall steer from Maxtors in the future then.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

No mate I was talking about the IBM deathstar I was actually praising the Maxtors in that they are a lot better these days than they used to be.

For me order of preference

(1) Seagate
(2) Maxtor
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(123131372183713) IBM

Re: Harddrive Question
 

:rofl:

I see your point...just Maxtors I've owned always seem to have a 14month lifespan :lol:

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Fair enough give Seagate a try then I've primarily been using seagates and had just the 1 failure with a Seagate - not bad going considering.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Well I will be talking three harddrives and likely replace my budget dvdrw combi drive while I am at it.

Been getting some strange lockups today...could be HD related...hope not.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Just to clarify my Maxtor has done that noise thing since purchase (about 13 m/o now).

Have you checked Event Viewer - sometimes get HD-related error messages in there.

Re: Harddrive Question
 

Come to think of it I never even view the event logger :rofl: I just use the machine and do the standard maintence once a month.

It has been noisy since I got it in 05, but recently it has increased.