SAS and gaming?

You may get games with massive files to load faster, but that is about it, is the same as people who say raid 0 makes all their games load faster, some it will, most it wont.

but hey! why not put those suckers to use!
 
Yes it is, but unless I'm mistaken not even a 15k SAS drive will cap that. Someone tell me if I'm wrong?
 
Probably better off selling then getting a X25-M G2?
 
nope, you are not wrong at all. it will most likely take 3 15k SAS drives to fully max out the 250MB/sec of pci-e 1x. it would be a few more then that if sombody would make (or let me know about) a pci-e 2.0 SAS card.
since you already have the drives i say go for it. you will see a few things be a bit faster but unless you are doing things that are very I/O intensive it will not affect much
 
i used to have 4 x 15k SAS drives in raid 0 for gaming but switched over to ssds, you get better performance out of ssds, but if you already have everything you need to run sas raid then it won't hurt to play with it.
 
Do these SAS drives you have laying around have a cage with a backplane or something? How many of these drives do you have?

And many drives you have in the system now?

With boards typically having 6 or more sata ports I am just trying to understand why you don't hook one or 2 up for testing before you spend more money on them.

Personally I wouldn't want the noise in my PC but maybe they wont bother you.
 
you can't connect sas drives to sata ports, he would need sas controller, not sure if he has one "lying around"
 
You will be bottlenecked performance wise by the controller you linked in the original post. Not so much because of any bandwidth limitations but rather because the controller itself just isn't very good. In order to really see performance out of those drives you'd need something with a XOR processor in it. You won't find anything like that for less than $300.00 unless you get a used/system pulled Perc/5i or Perc/6i from a Dell server.
 
Assuming he's using Raid 0, why would you need one with an XOR processor?
 
extide said:
Assuming he's using Raid 0, why would you need one with an XOR processor?
Click to expand...

True enough. I didn't think about running RAID-0 as I rarely see SAS drives used in that manner. Still the cache memory and throughput of a high end controller will beat that $79.99 piece of crap any day of the week regardless of how it's used. Truthfully the OP could get the same performance or better out of some Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB drives and he would certainly get better performance out of a good SSD.
 
ya sas drives in raid 0 are not very common but I ran 4x sas in raid 0 on areca for almost a year, you get good performance but now with ssds finally being affordable 2x ssds will give you better performance, run cooler, quieter and use less power. Oh and unless you doing some crazy setup you won't need an expensive controller either.
 
I'm running Cheetah 15k.5s, just singly no RAID on an Adaptec 29320LPE (PCI-E 1x). The drives pull about 135MB/sec max and 114MB average, so 2 of those in RAID0 would theoretically be able to max out the 1x PCI-E. The access time hits about 5.5ms, I think this is the bigger advantage for gaming as opposed to max transfer rate. They do make noticeably better gaming drives than 7200 rpm SATA drives. SSDs seem to be the way to go now mind you, I just don't trust them yet.

Dustin
 
Well, given a nice controller with a bunch of cache will be faster, but I would think the fast seek of the SAS drives in a stripe would definitely feel faster than some striped WD640's, especially considering he has the drives. Personally, I would already have ordered the card, but I might look for one with 4 ports instead of two as that is kind of limiting in the future... But then you would want to go pci-e x4... Really not a bad idea to go with that card.. :)

Remember even if you max out pci-e 1x with this setup, it doesn't matter, the seek times will still be a big benefit vs a SATA drive, and that's where you get most of your performance gain (system snappyness).
 
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