Harddrive Question

[AndrewJ]

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.

[Graham M]

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.

[gavinc]

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.

[AndrewJ]

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

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

[Graham M]

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

[ZrByte]

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.

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

[AndrewJ]

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?

[The Jackal]

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.

[AndrewJ]

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.

[The Jackal]

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 ----------

Originally Posted by Felinix_Devotion

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.

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).

[AndrewJ]

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

Originally Posted by Felinix_Devotion

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?

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

[AndrewJ]

Originally Posted by zinglebarb

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

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

pretty much any brand you want