Telorn

I've always wondered about this and would appreciate input.

I have 2 15K RPM SCSI Fujitsu and 1 15k IBM drive, all 18 GB each. I currently run my OS on one and my pagefile on the other and the 3rd is used for storage. I place my games on a 36 GB WD SATA Raptor.

Am I better off having these 3 run individually as they currently are or would I have better performance if I ran a software RAID0 in WindowsXP? Or would the CPU requirement of a software RAID outweigh the benefit of a RAID?

Is there a better setup for my 4 HDs that you can think of? Currently BF2 definitely loads, and allows me to enter the game, in under a minute. I can tell I'm usually one of the first ones to enter the game.

Thanks for the input.

Here are my specs:

AMD 3200 Barton, running at 2.3 GHz
Gigabyte 7NNXP
2x512 MB RAM
NVidia 6800GT
SB Audigy 2 Gamer
Adaptec 19160 SCSI controller

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Telorn

KillerTarget

I would say just keep running like you are currently. I don't know how much pure software RAIDing puts on your proc, and your proc could defitnitly take teh strain, but I don't know how much of a performance increase you would get and if it would be worth it. If you got ahold of a SCSI RAID controller that did pure hardware RAID I would say go ahead and try it out, but remember if one of those drives suddenly dies you loose everything on all drives on the RAID0 partition.

What are you doing with an 18 gig pagefile HD, or do you also stick other programs on that HD?

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Apophis

Software based RAID is rarely worthwhile. But you could pick yourself up a cheap SCSI RAID controller on EBay and do hardware RAID rather cheaply!

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Telorn

I store my misc files with the pagefile HD. Like all my program downloads/drivers/game demos/backup files. I usually have around 10 gigs free on it.

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Telorn

Telorn

But you definitely think a HW RAID with these 3 harddrives running my OS and pagefile on the same 'virtual drive' would be better than keeping them seperate as I currently do? Would I be better off going with RAID5 and still see a good performance increase? I only have SCSI3, so anything above 160MB/s throughput would be wasted. After testing my 2 Fujitsu's, they can do a sustained transfer of around 70 megs each. The IBM is a little slower around 50-60.

Or would I be better placing my OS on the WD Raptor and placing my games files on a RAID0 configuration?

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Telorn

jackmacokc

++

If you cant do hardware raid, then don't bother. Software raid is really only effective in linux if you ask me.

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TheFeniX

Software RAID0 shouldn't put too much strain on your CPU as there is no need for parity calculations (there is no parity, period). Software RAID can almost kill your CPU if you lose a drive in RAID5 configuration, the mainboard CPU is just not designed for those calculations. Now, I doubt you'd get a decent performance gain from software RAID0, but I also doubt you'd lose any speed.

If you want hardware RAID on the "cheap," you can pick up a PCI expansion IDE RAID card. They'll run you around 70 bucks, but you should notice a performance gain.

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icky

Let me get this straight... you want to reconfigure your whole system so you can load BF2 maps faster?

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TheFeniX

I'm fairly positive Windows XP will not allow you to run RAID on the system partition, so the only thing he'd have to redo would be data (games, files, pron, pagefile, etc).

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Telorn

I posted about this on the TomsHardware forums and someone gave me links to articles that explained how RAID does not help a single-user environment, hardware or software.

So, I'm going to leave my drives as is, which apparently helps my system better.

I also found out interesting information about how SCSI does command queuing and can actually lower I/O performance in a single user environment. The newer SATA drives are starting to support command queue, as well..so you're actually better off using a SATA controller that doesn't support it so it isn't activated.

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Telorn