Raid

[ilw]

Is it worth it?
My current c: drive (with windows installed on it) is an old hard drive, prob 5400rpm so its definitely top of my list for upgrading, but i'm not sure what to. The cheap option would be to just get a small 7200 rpm drive which would cost me nowt and I reckon would probably give a noticeable speed increase, at the other end of the price scale i could go for 2 western digital raptor drives and stick them in a raid config, but that wwould cost like £140 ($250 US approx). Alternatively i could go for 1 raptor, or two normal drives in raid.
The rest of my computer isn't exactly top of the range anymore, but I don't play games that much so its fine:
XP2600, 1.5GB RAM decentish gfx card

Basically from your experiences of raid, which option do you reckon would get me teh best bang for my buck.

Cheers

[j2k4]

Is it worth it?
My current c: drive (with windows installed on it) is an old hard drive, prob 5400rpm so its definitely top of my list for upgrading, but i'm not sure what to. The cheap option would be to just get a small 7200 rpm drive which would cost me nowt and I reckon would probably give a noticeable speed increase, at the other end of the price scale i could go for 2 western digital raptor drives and stick them in a raid config, but that wwould cost like £140 ($250 US approx). Alternatively i could go for 1 raptor, or two normal drives in raid.
The rest of my computer isn't exactly top of the range anymore, but I don't play games that much so its fine:
XP2600, 1.5GB RAM decentish gfx card

Basically from your experiences of raid, which option do you reckon would get me teh best bang for my buck.

Cheers

You want to talk to Lynx and Clocker, Ian.

[lynx]

On an old system, you probably won't have the basic throughput to see the real advantage of a raid system, assuming you are talking about striping rather than mirroring. I assume you haven't got the option of SATA, and 2 drives in raid 0 config on a single PATA bus won't give you any performance gain.

An underused high capacity drive will give good performance gains. Average seek times seem to have remained fairly constant at about 9 or 10 ms. However, the capacity has increased quite dramatically. So what was an average 10 ms to find a track on a 20 GB drive is now the same time on a 300 GB drive. To find a track in the first 20 GB of the drive will probably take under 2 ms, obviously 5 times as fast, as long as you keep the drive defragged and space optimised regularly.

Go for a the biggest drive your system will support (but don't forget the 137GB limit if relevant), there isn't really much difference in price between a small drive and a large drive but there's a whole world of difference in potential performance.

[ilw]

yes i would like to do striping and i've got an Asus a7n8x deluxe mobo, so its got 2 SATA ports... does this change your recommendation?
(I don't have to worry about the 137 GB limit)
cheers

[Duffman]

Dude, WD Raptors, raid, droooool. It is so fast, even windows boots noticibly faster.

[clocker]

Still waiting on those HDDTach screenshots, Duff.
I have nothing better to do than stalk you till you get off your ass and post 'em.
Besides, it makes for a much more convincing argument when you can show what has you so excited that you drool.

Actually, skip the benchmark shots.
Let's just see a pic of you drooling.

[Duffman]

Ill give you pics, in hell!!!

[clocker]

I can meet you there anytime.
I'm just around the corner.

[gsky]

i would say two large sata drives (7200 is fine as i would go for compacity instead of speed considering the price) in raid 0 is your best bet using the sata connections...