[TheVinylRipper]

Freeware disk speed checker.


http://www.roadkil.net/DskSpeed.html

 

[The Pieman]

XP Still haven't found a reason to "upgrade" to Vista.

Simon

 

[LowPhreak]

Quote:

Originally Posted by TheVinylRipper /img/forum/go_quote.gif I use separate drives for the OS and the page file and it helps considerably. Keep them on separate controllers if at all possible. PCI disk controllers are really cheap and can speed up your system considerably if you use them to take the page file and OS load off your main drive(s). Also XP is a lot more stable if you have plenty of memory, 512 meg isn't really enough if you are in the habit of running more than one or two applications at the same time.

Yep, well they're SATA, so I figure I can forgo the PCI controllers. RAM is 2GB of PC2-8500 Ballistix running @ 1,110, so that's plenty for the time being.

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Quote:

Originally Posted by LowPhreak /img/forum/go_quote.gif Yep, well they're SATA, so I figure I can forgo the PCI controllers. RAM is 2GB of PC2-8500 Ballistix running @ 1,110, so that's plenty for the time being.

There are people around with spare drives that can speed up their systems if they use them right, particularly so if they don't have a lot of ram.

A lot of people with older systems are beginners or users who have not upgraded for one reason or another. Better performance for cheap might be interesting to them.

That's all..


Peace..

 

[LowPhreak]

Better performance for cheap is ALWAYS interesting to me!

 

[jsaliga]

I'm running Mac OS X and Windows Vista Ultimate (properly performance tuned) on my 24" Intel iMac.

--Jerome

 

[eduj]

XP

 

[Dachink]

Vista Ultimate 64bit
XP 32bit

 

[Rhynri]

@lowfreak - i agree with your article, raid 0 doesn't make a noticable difference from a singular drive. However, that article (from tomshardware... just a guess, i seem to have read those exact words before) doesn't apply to raids other than 0. there is a huge difference, operationally and otherwise between a raid zero and a raid 5, especially with 5 high-speed drives. The fact the it took me less than 10 minutes to install xp says something. Additionally, there was a half a bar of progress tracking (when you boot the OS) before it dropped me to a desktop... quite literally seconds from bios handoff to desktop. (Faster than anything my macbook has ever acheived.. which says something cause OSX boots FAST!)

@Dark Archon I use scythe s-flex fans, utilizing sony's fluid dynamic bearing (noiseless), at 1400rpm they produce 67cfm at 27db. I tend to undervolt them to 6v or so for 900rpm entirely silent operation. There are three of them in my case, in addition to the 1400 rpm 36cfm thermaltake 3 drive enclosure fan (mounted in a drive bay) and the 140mm corsair psu fan, which is entirely silent. The most noise the pc ever makes is when you turn it on and hear the sound of 7 drives spinning up at once (i should record that, it's an awesome sound... bweeeeeeEEEEEEENNNNNNNN!!)

But once they spin up they are very quiet actually, until they start 'thinking'. I can only equate that noise to a waterfall, or perhaps radio static as heard through a pillow. Most definately interesting. They all work (basically) together so the effect sounds much like one loud drive thinking.

@lowfreak again - I believe i'm seeing a speed improvement, which is what is important. Aside from that, is there a bad thing about having one 550gb raptor speed (or better) drive with data security? Especially cause my insurance company paid for it, not me~~~!

 

[TheVinylRipper]

LowPhreak,

Quote:

"...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.

Apparently the chipset you are using for the raid controller makes a considerable difference in speed increases from single disk to raid 0.

http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q2.../index.x?pg=28

Quote:

However, the nForce3 is able to bounce back with impressive IOMeter performances with RAID 0 and 1 arrays, speedy ATTO transfer rates, and awe-inspiring read burst speeds in RAID 0......... If the VT8237 has one weak spot, it's performance scaling in IOMeter, where RAID 1 and 0 arrays struggle to perform better than single-drive configurations.

 

[Sir Nobax]

If you do not care about harddrive failures (i don't) and you have the space, and you want a 500GB HDD, then i don't see a reason not to get two 250GB drives instead and put them in RAID 0.

Boot speed will increase significantly, processing large files like raw video will go faster and average harddisk bandwidth gets a boost.

 

[TheVinylRipper]

Well, yes... If you have the right chipset.

 

[Sir Nobax]

Hmm, i remember seeing some benchmarks where the 'hacked' WinXP Pro software RAID 0 was faster then some 'hardware' RAID controllers (integrated ones that is).

 

[TheVinylRipper]

I had forgotten all about software raid..

http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149

Quote:

Since I’ve convinced you to wipe your drives now, give some consideration to how you will be partitioning them. Keep in mind that to do software RAID it is not necessary to have matched drives. You could get this done with an 80GB and a 40GB without giving up drive space. This is an advantage over hardware RAID, which requires like drives to retain all drive space. However, even in the software setup, I would suspect performance would take a hit if one drive was significantly slower than the other, or the buffers were different sizes. Here is how I partitioned using two 80GB Maxtor drives: * C: =10GB single drive for Windows * E: = 100GB on two drives (50GB on each drive striped). * F: =10GB Single drive for backups * G: = 25GB Single drive for downloads * Z: = 2GB on two drives (1GB on each drive striped) for the swapfile

 

[LowPhreak]

Rhynri -

On fans: I'm currently using 3x Noctua 12cm + 1x Noctua 8cm in a Cooler Master Stacker 810 case, and a Noctua NH-U12F HSF (1x 12cm).

The Noctua fans are very quiet with their "SSO" bearings. If I run them around 1,100 RPM @ 10.5V, I get about 58 CFM @ 23dB for the 12cm's, with of course slightly higher dB's and lower CFM for the 8cm version. I am very happy with the Noctua's.

The exhaust side of the HSF can fit another 12cm, but with the temps I'm getting on the E6600 @ 3,348 daily, the single fan is doing fine. Idle is 18-22C, load is 39-43C, (running say 2 instances of F@H 24/7).

The PSU in my main box is Enermax Infiniti 720 with a 13.5cm fan. Even when I o/c a power-hog vid card (Asus HD2900XT) that big PSU fan never gets to noticeable dB's. The GPU fan is louder anyway but it doesn't become too loud I think because of the fairly low case temps to start with. It also helps having the PSU bottom-mounted in the Stacker.

I have a Corsair HX520W in another box running an Athlon, and AFAIK all the Corsair PSU's have 12cm fans, not 14cm.

On the HD/RAID issue: you could well be seeing a real-world speed increase from your setup, and yes, 550GB of Raptor goodness is nice. But the cost is out of proportion for the potential speed gain, IMHO.