2 seperate drives vs raid 0

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Hungfoo

Gawd
Joined
Mar 30, 2001
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538
I have a few questions involving disc storage management concerning performance.

1. Is it better to have 2 seperate drives with 1 dedicated to os and programs and the other for loose files than having the drives set up as raid 0?

2. do partitions dictate where on the drive files/programs will be stored?
ie. c drive closer to the center than d: on a single disc

3. with modern SATA drives, does the size slow down performance?
ie. would the access time of an 80 gig drive be better than on a 320gb (lets assume they are both seagate cuda 7200.10 sata 3.0 drives with the perpendicular recording)
 
1. Depends on your program usage, RAID controller, aversion to risk, acceptable price/performance ratio, etc. If you want a possible real world 5-15% average speed improvement for typical Windows usage, at least in my experience, for double the cost and risk, go for RAID0. If not, stick with single drives.

2. Yes. Your first partition, C:\, would start at the outermost part of the platter(s). Others would be in from there.

3. No. Usually the larger drives have denser platters which mean more data stored within a given space over a smaller drive, which may lead to better performance. Sometimes the difference between a smaller and larger drive could be the number of platters, but with the same density, in which case there most likely is no difference in performance.
 
so youre saying that the outermost part of the disc is where the system files are stored?

o and price/risk is not a factor. im solely concerned with efficiency. my theory is that if i have one dedicated disc for OS and programs which is always defragged and one that i just pile files on kept seperate, that it might be more efficient than having 2 discs in raid 0 with all the os/programs/files mixed together.
 
Hungfoo said:
so youre saying that the outermost part of the disc is where the system files are stored?

o and price/risk is not a factor. im solely concerned with efficiency. my theory is that if i have one dedicated disc for OS and programs which is always defragged and one that i just pile files on kept seperate, that it might be more efficient than having 2 discs in raid 0 with all the os/programs/files mixed together.
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Well there's a little more to it than that. If you have a small first partition for your OS/apps, yes, the files will be concentrated there but they will still be scattered about the partition even after using Window's defragmenter. A third party defragmenter(PerfectDisk, O&O, etc.) is capable of ordering files by system, name, usage, etc from the very edge of the platter inward and therefore giving you the best file placement possible. Of course if you use a third party defragmenter, it would remove the need of making a partition in order to keep the files near the outside of the platter in the first place. And if you want an efficient drive setup, use the singles setup and keep your pagefile and data on the second drive.
 
very good information, which will probly raise more questions, but thx.

i see you, yourself have 2 raptors in raid 0 and what looks to be a third drive for storage :p

im thinking now that it might be nice to raid 0 with the third party defraggers to manage 3 partitions. 1 for os, 1 for programs and 1 for storage. would that not be as efficient as the separate drives with pagefile on the 2nd?
 
Hungfoo said:
very good information, which will probly raise more questions, but thx.

i see you, yourself have 2 raptors in raid 0 and what looks to be a third drive for storage :p

im thinking now that it might be nice to raid 0 with the third party defraggers to manage 3 partitions. 1 for os, 1 for programs and 1 for storage. would that not be as efficient as the separate drives with pagefile on the 2nd?
Click to expand...
Separating your OS and programs on two different partitions will do nothing to improve performance and offers no benefit really, so I don't recommend it. If your thought is being able to do an OS reinstall without reinstalling programs, well, a lot the programs write to the registry that the new install wouldn't have and would require reinstallation anyway. If you try RAID0, I'd put the OS and apps on it without any partitions and get a third drive for data and put the pagefile on it as well. Then I highly suggest you invest in a backup program like Acronis True Image to image/backup the RAID0 setup to your data drive so if a drive goes bad and breaks your RAID array, you can replace it and reimage your OS and programs to the new RAID0 array and be just as new in less than a half hour typically. This is my setup. If you run everything on RAID0 and one drive goes, you've lost EVERYTHING. I really don't recommend it with only two drives.
 
meh ok...i think ill go with your original advice and have the 2 separate with the pagefile on disk 2. thx again.
 
tuskenraider said:
Separating your OS and programs on two different partitions will do nothing to improve performance and offers no benefit really, so I don't recommend it. If your thought is being able to do an OS reinstall without reinstalling programs, well, a lot the programs write to the registry that the new install wouldn't have and would require reinstallation anyway. If you try RAID0, I'd put the OS and apps on it without any partitions and get a third drive for data and put the pagefile on it as well. Then I highly suggest you invest in a backup program like Acronis True Image to image/backup the RAID0 setup to your data drive so if a drive goes bad and breaks your RAID array, you can replace it and reimage your OS and programs to the new RAID0 array and be just as new in less than a half hour typically. This is my setup. If you run everything on RAID0 and one drive goes, you've lost EVERYTHING. I really don't recommend it with only two drives.
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I have to agree with this. I've tried several different configurations over the years, and seperating programs from the OS hasn't helped gain me any real performance.

I often advise people to use a single drive for their programs and operating system, and store their data on a RAID 1 array, and then back that up to DVD or media of their choice if the data is important to them. The truth is that RAID helps with uptime, and when you get down to it RAID offers very little real world performance bennefits over a single drive setup for most application.
 
ya i saw that tusk i didnt think it could possibly be that easy tho...

heres a riddle...with the simple 2 drive set up with the pagefile on the 2nd drive how would playing games while downloading large files effect performance...and would you store the mp3 player on the 2nd drive as well as the mp3's?

no i see now that separating the progs just distances them further from the edge.

and im starting to see that other than redundancy...raid doesnt help much unless ur trying to encode or transfer data
 
Hungfoo said:
ya i saw that tusk i didnt think it could possibly be that easy tho...

heres a riddle...with the simple 2 drive set up with the pagefile on the 2nd drive how would playing games while downloading large files effect performance...and would you store the mp3 player on the 2nd drive as well as the mp3's?

no i see now that separating the progs just distances them further from the edge.

and im starting to see that other than redundancy...raid doesnt help much unless ur trying to encode or transfer data
Click to expand...
Playing games and downloading files to the same drive shouldn't slow down game performance. Personally I have my downloads go to my data drive so my OS/app drive isn't bothered at all. And finally, I'd leave the MP3 player(program) on the first drive and MP3 files on the second. It's all about logically splitting up drive resources so you get the most benefit out of both at the same time.
 
tuskenraider said:
Separating your OS and programs on two different partitions will do nothing to improve performance and offers no benefit really, so I don't recommend it. If your thought is being able to do an OS reinstall without reinstalling programs, well, a lot the programs write to the registry that the new install wouldn't have and would require reinstallation anyway.
Click to expand...


Atm I'm running a 2x250gig hard drives the first drive has a 30gig partition for the os, 200gig partition for just Programs/games. The other one is unpartitioned and is basically just for my random shit. I honestly have no idea how exactly its gonna work but if I can get away with not losing game saves and whatnot then it will be worth it if my comp does decide to screw up, as I don't frequently backup my data. So there is always that aspect of it :)
 
i have a 750w thermaltake PSU...you think its ok to hook both sata drives to the same rail?
 
Hungfoo said:
i have a 750w thermaltake PSU...you think its ok to hook both sata drives to the same rail?
Click to expand...

Sure. Hard drives only draw ~15w while they're spinning. Spinning up only takes 35w or so.
 
If you have enough RAM, get rid of the swap file altogether. I just built a new PC with 4GB of ram and turned it off. No weird problems so far. *knock on wood*

As for your drives question, I used to do RAID0 and make 4 partitions - OS, Programs, Swap File, and then Misc. I thought it was a little overkill, but it made things efficient. However, with my new system, I went with 1 drive for OS and programs, no swap file, and then a raid0 for misc (I do a lot of quickpar, winrar, etc on it). This way, the first drive containing the OS hardly gets fragmented.
 
tuskenraider said:
And if you want an efficient drive setup, use the singles setup and keep your pagefile and data on the second drive.
Click to expand...
I did something similar to this a while back.
I have 2 raptor 74gb drives. Partition sizes approx.
Drive 0:
-Partion 0: 64gb main partition (drive C:\ OS and programs only
-5 gb second partion (drive D:\ cache and temp files, 2gb pagefile
Drive 1: 69gb one partition (drive E:\ 2gb pagefile, games

On drive 0, I had the operating system installed to partition C:. I used a combination of X-setup, TweakXP, and some registry tweaks to move all "cache" and "temporary files" folders to the D: partition. Anytime Internet Explorer wrote temporary internet files, it stayed away from my main partition, and left my main drive fragment free and fast.
On drive 1: I put a 2gb static pagefile. I installed all my games to this second drive.

I had read that putting the pagefile on a separate drive would speed up windows. But then I thought, what if I put another pagefile on the 5gb partition?
When the computer read from drive C: it would write to the page file on drive E:
When the computer would read the games from drive E: it would write to the swap file on drive D:. Wishful Thinking?:confused:
I had no way of testing if it did anything.
Is Windows smart enough to do this? Or did one pagefile become an extension of the other, or not used, rendering this method pointless?
 
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