Drive for Games Drive for OS

E

EQTakeOffense

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2002
Messages
1,643
Would having a Raptor 150 for the OS, the another Raptor 150 for Games improve performance over a single Raptor 150 with both the OS and games on it?

I'm going to have 2 x 250GB Radio 0 for storage btw.
 
On paper yes. The question imo is "what is the real world difference between the 2 setups and is it worth $300" which I have not seen a stopwatch style benchmark. Maybe someone who has a pair of raptors could do a test :)

Also, you might want to have a backup strategy for that array. Level 0 isnt really optimal for long term storage.
 
I'm honestly not too worried about Raid 0....

I know if one hard drive fails, I lose all the information. But, honestly, I'm not too worried about that. If the WD drives last me five years (which I expect is reasoanble) I'll be happy. And, if in five years the drives die, I'll just buy a new one and put the information back on (mostly CDs). So *shrugs* Losing a drive when I expect the drive to last me 5 years isn't a big deal to me.
 
It isn't just drive failure...there may be other issues with the drive that aren' tnecessarily fatal to it that can affect the raid 0 array.
 
EQTakeOffense said:
Like what?
Click to expand...

Controller glitch, bad cable, power failure (PSU crater or utility outage) while the controller is writing to the array. These are all capable of "breaking" the array while leaving the drives fully functional.
 
Thanks for the follow up. That is what I was referring to. Anything that can interrupt the array has the ability to break it, permanently.
 
I would personally prefer a drive for the OS and games and then buy a single 250GB HD or maybe two of them in a RAID.
 
drive for OS & games
drive for swap file

swapfile should be on 1st partition and dedicated for swap only.
I use the rest of the swap disk partitions for storage - nothing I use on a regular basis

I've never used 3 disks for OS/swap/games but it's an interesting idea.
 
Buy 2GB of RAM before buying a HDD for page file. If you already have 2GB of RAM, set the page file to the same minimum and maximum size (to prevent fragmentation) and forget about it.
 
I appreciate this topic. I had planned to get

1x WD740ADFD - OS
1x WD740ADFD - games
1x 7200 drive - storage

Now I may reconsider this and get

1x WD1500ADFD - OS/games
1x ??? - swap
1x 7200 drive - storage

Suggestions on a drive for the swap file since I would have the 150 gig as boot/games? The notion of the 36 gig raptor occured to me. Space is really not the issue at this point, but I'm concerned about the bad rap the 36 gig model has gotten. Would I be better off with a really good 7200 rpm drive for swap?
 
DougLite said:
Buy 2GB of RAM before buying a HDD for page file. If you already have 2GB of RAM, set the page file to the same minimum and maximum size (to prevent fragmentation) and forget about it.
Click to expand...
Good point, the more ram you've got the less you'll have to use the swap file. I've never set the page file min/max to the same size but it's a good idea. To avoid defrag issues i've always put the swap on the 1st patrition on the 2nd drive and sized the partition to the size I was going to make the page file.

If you want to get serious about partitioning you can check this - http://partition.radified.com/
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top