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Raid array or partitioned drives?
I am in the process of upgrading some older components of my computer to be up to par with the 5850 graphics card I am running; my mobo and proc in particular are years old and in need of an upgrade. I picked up an Asus Crosshair IV mobo and AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition proc for the upgrade. Currently I have one 500 GB WD SATA HDD in my setup and I have an identical drive sitting in a box to be added in when I wipe the system and install the new stuff and start over with a fresh windows install. What I am wondering is, will it be better to install those two SATA drives as a raid array or as two partitions, one for the OS and wone for games/prgrams? I have never messed with either in the past; overall I am looking for the best performance in gaming in relation to the HDD's.
At a glance this is what the system will look like when it is upgraded:
Asus Crosshair IV mobo
AMD Phenom II 965 Black Edition quad core proc @ 3.4 ghz
2x ATI 5850 graphics cards in Crossfire steup
Razer Barracuda AC-1 audio card (which might no be in there if the Supreme FX X-Fi sound built into the mobo ends up being as good or better)
2x 2 gb Kingston 1600 mhz DDR3 RAM
Antec 900 case
2x WD Caviar Green 500 gb SATA drives in:
RAID array or HDD partitions? TBD...
Comments
There are several different types of raids. One will combine both HDD's into one large HD, One will use the 2nd HD as a back up. and so on.
What you want is to combine the two into a raid, then partition it if you want to break it down into smaller HD's.
Does that make sence
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
Speaking as someone who just recently went from a pair of WD Black 640's in RAID 0 to partitioned drives, I much prefer the latter. Now granted, it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, since my OS/Primary drive is now a WRaptor, but the responsiveness is much improved now, even if the synthetic bandwidth is lower now.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
Yes I see what you are saying and thanks. I didn't know you could also partition a RAID array. I was aware of the different types of RAID arrays and the one I was thinking of using was RAID 0, having the two runs as one like you mentioned. If I run the two in RAID 0 and partition them, I think I would want the larger partition for games/programs, is there a recommended partion size for running the OS on, my OS is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit.
RAID 0 all the way.
Partitioned drives can increase your system performance, but the main use is for data security, backup, and multi-booting.
He who keeps his cool best wins.
Thaknks for your perspective and now you have me searching the net for synthetic bandwidth hehe. I consider myself fairly tech saavy or at least moderately tech knowledgable, but you just threw something new at me there lol. I surely don't know what synthetic bandwidth is.
Just give a little head room for the C drive and you should be ok. Does 100gb for C sound about right ?
Velika: City of Wheels: Among the mortal races, the humans were the only one that never built cities or great empires; a curse laid upon them by their creator, Gidd, forced them to wander as nomads for twenty centuries...
theres a lot of variables in raid performance. The raid controller is the biggest factor. Some of them suck so badly you end up with worse performance in a raid/0 then you do in a standard setup.
ive seen it go both ways. My last MSI motherboard had a terrible raid controller (nvidia nforce chipset) and ran better in standard setup then raid. While my current asus p5q pro motherboard runs much better in raid then standard.
The mobo I am going to be using has an AMD SB850 chipset w/ SATA 6 bg ports and a JMicron JMB363 Controller.
Basically, all HDD's are rated at maximum read/write speeds. Thing is, those are maximum values, and you'll almost never see them, unless it involves a single large file that is aligned on the HDD all in one big chunk, near the outside of the spinning platter.
If you look at hard disk reviews, you'll notice that they'll measures data transfer speeds for 4K, 512K, and sequential files, with the latter having the highest values, and the first having the lowest. Fact is, mechanical HDD's SUCK for rapid small file actions. Even putting drives in RAID 0 doesn't help much, because that only helps with the actual data transfer speed, it does nothing to improve the seek (searching) time that REALLY slows things down. But if you can move some of those files to a completely different drive, you can have two HDD's each doing their own independant thing without interferring with each other.
A Modest Proposal for MMORPGs:
That the means of progression would not be mutually exclusive from the means of enjoyment.
Honestly Id suggest not partitioning them at all. Other than doing this for the sole reason to keep your OS and your games seperate, you're not going to benefit from it from a performance standpoint. It could actually have the opposite effect.
Windows 7 is a bit harder to control where it wants to put programs. If you go outside of standard installs for programs, you'll find that you still end up with files and directories on your C: in your programs folder in turn spreading out your installation more than it would by default (and ruining this nice seperation of OS and programs)
The only reason I would recommend a seperate partition is for large storage drives to keep media on.