[Rhynri]

@Thread - OSX has X11, you can find many opensource projects (gimp, bitpim, openoffice) that have mac .dmg packages for us with OSX and X11. It runs fast, as you might imagine - as OSX is a posix system.

@DarkArchon - If gentoo's portage is taking a long time to calculate dependencies (except on really large packages like Firefox) then you have it configured wrong. Mine typically took 6 seconds on average (i timed it). Gentoo's biggest advantage is it is the fastest OS out there, as i verified in my comparitive testing. My gentoo box (properly configured) ran faster with the Celeron-M (laptop it was) limited to 600mhz than any other linux distro i could find without the limiter on (1700mhz). *crosses heart* i swear it's the truth too. My gentoo had a lot of tweaks from me (6 days of my spare time went into setting it up) and did things like laptop-mode, meaning it only turned on the hard drive every 10 minutes and then only if needed. With all this, i was able to get an average of 6 hours battery life out of it, surfing wirelessly. Once i even forgot to shut her off and stuck it in my backpack On. Not only did it not even turn the fan on (it ran so very cool cause it was so optimized) but 12 hours later it was still on when i pulled it out. And i mean ON on, not standby.

Now @ DarkArchon again i think. There is this program called nLite that allows you to make a windows xp install disk that has the latest updates installed and your choice of components removed (i removed WMP, IE, etc... and all the drivers I didn't need. Then it allows you to specify a massive amount of windows tweaks. Using this, I shrunk my windows install 150mb, while adding drivers. No more hit f6 for raid!

Your apple case wouldn't work for me, it's far too small and wouldn't dump the heat fast enough. I have 7 HDD in my case. 5 x WD 150gb Raptors in a raid 5 (teehee - speed and data safety - 300mb/sec transfer for the win!) a 500gb WD Caviar, and a 320gb SeaGate. In addition to that I have two 320gb externals and an external enclosure currently housing a 250gb drive. The raid comes out to be about 550gb in size, I'm dropping 200gb space on the raid for the data safety factor. BTW, a raid 5 is faster than a raid zero in terms of read speed, which is what matters once your data in installed.

Eheheh, sorry for the rant.

 

[error401]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rhynri /img/forum/go_quote.gif @Thread - OSX has X11, you can find many opensource projects (gimp, bitpim, openoffice) that have mac .dmg packages for us with OSX and X11. It runs fast, as you might imagine - as OSX is a posix system.

Surprisingly enough, Windows is POSIX too. You can get X servers for it too, and they actually work quite well. I'd still rather run the apps in the native environment...

Quote:

BTW, a raid 5 is faster than a raid zero in terms of read speed, which is what matters once your data in installed.

No. RAID0 will always be faster than RAID5 if the controller/software is working properly. RAID0 uses all stripes for data, while RAID5 sacrifices some for parity of the data stripes. More stripes = more spindles reading = more speed. If that's not the case for you, fix your controller RAID5 is also drastically slower for writes. For many use cases, RAID1+0 is much faster than RAID5 for 'real world' definitions of faster.

But uh, Linux FTW...

 

[Dark_Archon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rhynri /img/forum/go_quote.gif @DarkArchon - If gentoo's portage is taking a long time to calculate dependencies (except on really large packages like Firefox) then you have it configured wrong. Mine typically took 6 seconds on average (i timed it). Gentoo's biggest advantage is it is the fastest OS out there, as i verified in my comparitive testing.

I was using Sabayon, so it wasn't as optimized as a regular Gentoo install which could have caused it. I have no doubt that it is the fastest GNU/Linux distro.
Quote:

Your apple case wouldn't work for me, it's far too small and wouldn't dump the heat fast enough. I have 7 HDD in my case. 5 x WD 150gb Raptors in a raid 5 (teehee - speed and data safety - 300mb/sec transfer for the win!) a 500gb WD Caviar, and a 320gb SeaGate. In addition to that I have two 320gb externals and an external enclosure currently housing a 250gb drive. The raid comes out to be about 550gb in size, I'm dropping 200gb space on the raid for the data safety factor. BTW, a raid 5 is faster than a raid zero in terms of read speed, which is what matters once your data in installed.

Now THAT is quite a hard drive setup. Do you have that in a mid-tower case, or did you go with a full tower?

I have 4 actual drive bays, and could get an insert for the second optical drive bay for two more drives, and use the two extra SATA 2 ports on the motherboard, but 6 is the limit. I honestly can't reasonably forsee myself reaching that limit as much as I'd like to...

I'd love to eventually have four Raptors in a RAID 5, but I have trouble justifying the cost, so I might have to appease myself with two 500 GB HDDs in RAID0(once I have the money), use one of the current drives to back important stuff up(to make up for the lack of redundancy), and the other for Linux and Windows.

The RAID 5 is faster because you are striping the data across more drives, and the actual specs say you lose one drive worth of space for redundancy, the rest of the loss is probably from formatting.

 

[wanderman]

if it is for a gaming pc raid 10 may perform a bit better then raid 5 with 4 disks. Raid 5 is pretty bad with small reads and writes.

 

[Malus]

I use FreeBSD on all of my machines. I find FreeBSD to be much more consistent and robust operating system than any Linux distro, but your mileage may vary. Right now, I'm using KDE as my desktop environment and I plan on continuing to use it unless they really mess up KDE 4 (though it looks pretty nice so far).

 

[sachu]

I voted Xp mainly because that is what i use at work.
But on my laptop i have XP and Suse 10.2 installed..

 

[Shinobi]

I have XP sp2 Pro I wont be going 64bit vista for a good while.

 

[LowPhreak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by wanderman /img/forum/go_quote.gif if it is for a gaming pc raid 10 may perform a bit better then raid 5 with 4 disks. Raid 5 is pretty bad with small reads and writes.

RAID anything is actually pretty silly for a gaming rig or most home uses. Ppl like to think they're getting something for all the extra drives, money, and complexity of a RAID setup, but it's barely a few percent faster than a single fast HD.

The only reason I can see RAID for home use is mirrored drives so that there's an exact copy in case one drive dies. In lieu of that, you're better off with a fast main HD and a decent 'enterprise' type backup drive.

I'll sit back now and wait while some of you get out your flamethrowers!

 

[NeObliviscaris]

xp for teh win!

 

[Dark_Archon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LowPhreak /img/forum/go_quote.gif RAID anything is actually pretty silly for a gaming rig or most home uses. Ppl like to think they're getting something for all the extra drives, money, and complexity of a RAID setup, but it's barely a few percent faster than a single fast HD. The only reason I can see RAID for home use is mirrored drives so that there's an exact copy in case one drive dies. In lieu of that, you're better off with a fast main HD and a decent 'enterprise' type backup drive. I'll sit back now and wait while some of you get out your flamethrowers!

I'd agree with your assessment in terms of seek time which is more significant for small reads/writes, but for sustained hard drive access, like moving big files, it does in fact help significantly. Plus it is kinda nice to not have to mess with stuff, or think about which drive to put a file on. I've never had a drive fail on me, so if I had a pair of matching drives, I wouldn't think twice about setting up a RAID 0.

 

[Rhynri]

@error401 - on the same 5 drives, two different controllers, i saw much better read speeds using three different hdd measuring utilities on the raid 5.
Maybe I have two bad controllers? I can't really test further. It's worth noting that the write speed on the raid 0 is faster.

@Dark Archon - It's a gigabyte aurora. I have each drive with one space in between, an arrangement which swallows up all but 3 5.25" slots, and all the hard drive ones (i could add more, but more heat as well)

@wanderman - Thanks for the suggestion. I will look into that, but most games are read large files. for example, Enemy Territory: Quake Wars uses one large texture that it cuts up into smaller sections.

@LowFreak - I feel no need to flame you. In my case, I have witnessed a massive increase in speed over one raptor drive, provable visibly when the pc is used and theoretically via benchmarking programs. I am satisfied that RAID is a sensible option.

 

[LowPhreak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rhynri /img/forum/go_quote.gif @LowFreak - I feel no need to flame you. In my case, I have witnessed a massive increase in speed over one raptor drive, provable visibly when the pc is used and theoretically via benchmarking programs. I am satisfied that RAID is a sensible option.

YMMV, but I'm just saying I've never seen a "massive" increase in speed with a RAID array on a typical desktop PC, only a barely discernable one that IMO didn't justify the extra hassle and expense. This flies in the face of many enthusiasts, who like to feel they've got some 'big guns' going in their rigs.

You could say I've learned my lesson, because multiple SCSI's or even Raptors are muy expensivo.

For my main PC/gaming rig I have a single Raptor 150 ADFD (down from previous RAIDed Raptors) and a WD 1600YS & 2500YS for storage. OS has its own 5GB partition on the Raptor, and the paging file has its own 5GB partition on the 1600YS. Copacetic!

But here's a good article that makes my point better.

"...If you haven't gotten the hint by now, we'll spell it out for you: there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

There are some exceptions, especially if you are running a particular application that itself benefits considerably from a striped array, and obviously, our comments do not apply to server-class IO of any sort. But for the vast majority of desktop users and gamers alike, save your money and stay away from RAID-0.

If you do insist on getting two drives, you are much better off putting them into a RAID-1 array to have a live backup of your data. The performance hit of RAID-1 is just as negligible as the performance gains of RAID-0, but the improvement in reliability is worthwhile..."

 

[Dark_Archon]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Rhynri /img/forum/go_quote.gif @Dark Archon - It's a gigabyte aurora. I have each drive with one space in between, an arrangement which swallows up all but 3 5.25" slots, and all the hard drive ones (i could add more, but more heat as well)

Very nice. Full tower cases are absolutely gigantic compared to mid-towers, but the roomier insides are definitely worth it. Heat dissipation would be a pretty serious problem with squeezing all those drives in a mid-tower.

How loud is is? Are you using stock cooling fans for everything?

Edit: And about the RAID thing, I kinda brought this up before, but I have storage spread across two separate drives, and it is a minor annoyance when I realize one is full. It would be nice if all that storage space was clumped together and I didn't have to ever shuffle files between the two drives when I was organizing things.

 

[terrymx]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Hooah /img/forum/go_quote.gif XP. I won't by Vista till at least the first SP. I am not a free beta tester. :s

xp, and i wont buy vista ever, no reason to. they'll probably have another os out by the time they get vista to run well.

Quote:

Originally Posted by LowPhreak /img/forum/go_quote.gif RAID anything is actually pretty silly for a gaming rig or most home uses. Ppl like to think they're getting something for all the extra drives, money, and complexity of a RAID setup, but it's barely a few percent faster than a single fast HD. The only reason I can see RAID for home use is mirrored drives so that there's an exact copy in case one drive dies. In lieu of that, you're better off with a fast main HD and a decent 'enterprise' type backup drive. I'll sit back now and wait while some of you get out your flamethrowers!

no i agree, but i use raid1 just for ease of mind after several data lost. but i find that having multiple partition in a drive is also very good.

 

[wanderman]

Raid is nice for peace of mind, but I still prefer dvd soon to be blu-ray backups. Imaging drives with arconis and sticking them on disks has saved me more times then any array.