• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Hard drives holding back performance?

H

huxley

Pleeze Maik Mee STFU!!
Joined
Oct 23, 2001
Messages
9,342
Nowadays people shoot for high end gfx cards, high end memory (DDR 3200/3500), but where do hard drives fit in this equation? I am by no means an expert, but when a person has a high end system and a 7200RPM hard drive, isn't the hard drive actually holding back performance or is this a fallacy?
 
anytime the disk needs to be accessed its a massive bottleneck
data storage "in memory" is several order faster the the fastest array of disks (barring solid state)
but how often that access occurs is totally application dependent

often the better performance investment is more RAM, whereas other times (like database) youd want a 64bit PCI bus, RAID array and dual balance gigibit LAN or FC

gaming typically only accesses the disk to load
whereas any extended writing, or reading activity can choke the application considerably (graphics for instance)
 
Interesting, thanks for the knowledge. I was most curious about gaming and you described it well.
 
thanx :D
actually knowing what kind of access pattern occurs can be very helpful in determining what gain you might expect

anything that is employing virtual memory will be impacted, overkill with a RAID array maynot be needed if you can employ several cheaper smaller (but fast) HDDs and use Multiple Pagefiles

there is also alot of confusion regarding where hardware and software RAID 0 begin and end

http://www.lostcircuits.com/hdd/hdd7/
Excrepts:

3. RAID controller integrated on the mainboard level. Often called RAID-lite because of limited functionality, except for dedicated Server boards. RAID on Mainboard (ROMB).

The third implementation, that is RAID-Lite, is currently gaining substantial popularity since almost every better mainboard manufacturer equips their mainboard with an integrated controller of some sort, the main players at this time being Promise, SiliconImage and HighPoint.

Whether any given RAID solution is Hardware or Software often boils down to a matter of semantics. That is, by definition, any dedicated hardware RAID channels will qualify the array as Hardware RAID. However, often enough another distinction is made based on the presence or absence of a dedicated XOR processor. That is, any hardware RAID controller without the additional controller will often be referred to as software RAID, in other words, there is a grayzone. We will cover the significance of the XOR operations a bit later, for now, let’s start with the “lesser” levels of RAID, that is Level 0, 1, 0+1 and JBOD.
Click to expand...

the above is primarilly applicable to onboard IDE\ATA RAID
where the CPU is impacted for the process, SCSI RAID or external arrays have a much better performance and less cpu impact typically.

that said a nice fast IDE HDD can make things alot snappier
something you can appreciate in just your basic day to day use.
 
All I know is in my case its.., 1) graphics card....2) Displays....3. CPU.... MoBo...RAM...optical drives....hard drive.

Not that hard drives are inconsequential to speed. The consensus is a fancy graphics card + display will enhance the total experience more than anyhing else.
 
i disagree, most graphics cards are plenty fast for everthing except 3D gaming, most hard drives are not fast enough to not notice them lagging the system. Just try and load 2 things at once, or copy a large file and load an app... LAG

I <3 my U160 Scsi
 
User perception is a goofy thing. If you want people to like their computer(s), get them a nice keyboard with a good feel, size, and any features they might need (wireless, or with fancy controls on it), a nice mouse with the same, a sharp, bright display, good speakers and sound card, quality video card, then start thinking about the guts. Users have contact with peripherals first, so those will occupy the bulk of their opinion. Of course this isn't to say the core isn't important; computers are tools, and if they don't do well what you need them to, your opinion will be unfavorable.

I'd actually say that disk I/O is a major psychological, and emperical, bottleneck in a machine. It's about the only thing that can cut a large number of seconds off of load times, which is what people tend to notice the most. CPU/mem are just so fast these days that most of what users do is done in the blink of an eye. Software devs also realize this and have implemented throbbers and progress bars to give people that psychological boost when tasks take longer than ~100ms, convincing them the machine is doing something (akin to giving a little kid a pacifier). All this is why when my family, friends, or clients want upgrades, the first thing to get replaced for general usage machines is the disk.

Upgrading to faster ATA units or even low-mid range SCSI will breathe life back into older (< 1GHz machines). Just be warned this can bite you in the ass, as I did this to my parents' machines ~2 years back and they're still using them... a 5 year-old P2-350 and a 4.5 year-old Cel-466. I put in a couple 60GXPs, activated the ATAPI TCQ, and instantly the machines ran a hell of a lot faster. Now the cases are breaking, Java apps run like a dog, and virus scans take forever, but they load software quick enough, so my folks refuse to upgrade any further. I made it even worse over Xmas when i got my father a logitech wireless keyboard/mouse combo, positively impacting his perception of the machine and delaying upgrades even more.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top