TheVinylRipper
500+ Head-Fier
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- Jul 12, 2007
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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. |
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. |
"...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. |
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. |
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 |