Announcement

**Benfica** · 08-11-2008, 01:38 PM

Originally posted by sincreator View Post

I've got my OS/Games on my raptor 10000rpm 73gig, and I've got my drivers/tools/patches/install packages(rivatuner,3dmark,xpadder) on my 80gig 7200rpm drive, and my movies/music on my 320gb 7200rpm drive.

My brother was telling me to make the 320gb the os drive and have the raptor 100% game drive. Will it really make that much difference? How much performance am I losing by having the os and games on the raptor?

Yes you may be losing some performance. Please read here what I think about it: http://utforums.epicgames.com/showth...=619548&page=4

Also how much faster is a raptor than my WD sataII 320gb 16mb cache drive? For gaming I mean?

http://www.storagereview.com/php/ben...3=267&devCnt=4

Couldn't find a 320GB drive here, but the Raptor is sick: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/10516/5

One last thing. Can I run a raid setup with these three drives? How do you do it, if its possible?(Im pretty sure the drives have to be the same)

Overall 2 independent drives beat RAID for desktop IMHO, if you know how to balance the load. Often it's faster than RAID, if you toast your rig you can take them to other PC and they work, you don't take the increased risk of RAID0, etc...

About setting RAID, the drives can be different, at least with the Intel controller. u should access the BIOS and go configure IDE . You have 3 options somewhere: IDE, AHCI and RAID. Select RAID, save and exit the bios. The machine reboots and then it will display a new message about how to enter the RAID setup utility. It's Ctrl+I on my machine. You can then select the disks that you want to build RAID with.
What people usually do is select a small portion of each drive at the beginning. This reduces the seek latency because the head only has to travel above a small area, over the outside tracks of the platters.

But it's all an huge hassle when you have a machine the way you like it. For me the safe way would be using a Linux boot disk, make a quick and dirty installation of XP on the 80GB disk or use some sort of backup/mirror/non-destructive partitioning software. Then copy your current Windows installation from the raptor to the 7200RPM drive and start using to boot, no need to copy the game files. If you have them under "c:\games" or whatever, so much the better.

Then, not sure. You will need to uninstall + reinstall some games. Others will still work after you modify the shortcut to point to the raptor, which isn't C: anymore

**oldkawman1** · 08-11-2008, 02:22 PM

RAID does not increase performance of playing games. A faster hard drive will only increase the speed of loading games. If your machine is accessing the hard drive while your playing a game, then there is either not enough memory or there are background processes running.

Game performance lies in the speed of the CPU, memory, and how fast the CPU and memory exchange data. Expensive hard drives, 10000 rpm drives, will only improve performance when a read or write operation occurs.

RAID typically, will actually slow down games slightly due to the added overhead on the system. RAID only does two things, it can add redundancy and and/or increase read write speeds.

Tips for max game performance;
#1 Use a dedicated Game Box - lean and mean, no fluf, no clutter, no added overhead. Use another box for everything else.
#2 Use a sound card - onboard sound is cpu intensive, up to 5% gains
#3 No added software, Av, etc - do not surf the web, look at porn, or anything with the game box

**Sincreator** · 08-12-2008, 12:57 AM

Thanks guy's.

The next time I format, I may have to try just games on the raptor 10000, and the os on the 320 7200rpm. Atleast it will free up some space on the 73gb raptor for more games. I format every month or two anyway. Just to keep everything fresh. The normal 80 gig drive is where I have all my backups any way. So it should be easy. I guess Ill just stay away from raid.

(Thanks also to roadkillgrill, who also supplied me with the same info through vent.)

PS. I was pretty surprised to see my drive actually beating the raptor x in alot of those tests.

Announcement

HDD peformance questions.

HDD peformance questions.

Comment

Comment

Comment