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Help set up a new 4-HDD system

N

Nicepants42

Gawd
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Aug 30, 2004
Messages
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I've got 4 Seagate 160gb sata drives that are going to be used in a new build (Specs at bottom). After reading this article, I'm not planning to set the drives up in a single RAID.

I'm not worried about redundancy becuase I have an external backup drive, and up until now I've been running these drives in one big RAID 0.

My question now is, how do I set up these drives for the best gaming and video encoding performance?

So far I'm thinking:
1) Set up 2 RAID 0's, (One with OS and swap file, the other for games)
OR
2) Set up one RAID 0 and two single drives (for 3 'drives' total) and put the OS on one, the swap file on another, and games on the last. Problem is, I don't know what would benefit the most from the RAID 0 (although I'm leaning toward the games).

What would be the best way to go if my top priority is game performance, seconded by content encoding/multitasking? Did I miss something? Is the article I referenced complete bunk?

Thanks in advance for input that is EXPLAINED to at least some degree.

New system is as follows:
ASUS A8R32-MVP Delux
Opteron 170
2x1gb Mushkin XP4000
2x X1800XT in crossfire
X-fi Xtrememusic
4x 160gb SATA HDD's (7200.9)
PCP&C Silencer 750

PS: I'm not interested in dropping more $$$ on a raptor. I got these drives for $40 each new, and the rest of the components were great deals also. I generally try to get the most for my money, and a few ms seek time improvement for $100 is not worth it to me.
 
I dont know what would be the best choice a lot of it is preference i would suggest option #2 because a RAID-0 only increases write performance not read performance. So if you do a lot of video encoding/writing video to file i would do that to a RAID-0 setup but as far as the other things i dont see there being any performance benefit. I would probably set up a RAID-0 for video encoding and i might put the swap file on there. I would take the other two and span them into a single 320GB drive.
 
When you say "encoding video", what are you doing? Converting DVDs into xvid/h264? Editing and compressing home movies to dvd? Describe it in more detail.

Raid 0 won't help you with cpu-bound tasks like compression. Run raid 0 for the games if you must, but the fastest way to get video to compress is a faster CPU. Having two seperate disks (or raid 0 volumes) to edit in is much faster than one large raid0 volume. I've done tests to that effect at some point.
 
unhappy_mage said:
When you say "encoding video", what are you doing? Converting DVDs into xvid/h264? Editing and compressing home movies to dvd? Describe it in more detail.

Raid 0 won't help you with cpu-bound tasks like compression. Run raid 0 for the games if you must, but the fastest way to get video to compress is a faster CPU. Having two seperate disks (or raid 0 volumes) to edit in is much faster than one large raid0 volume. I've done tests to that effect at some point.
Click to expand...

Ripping from DVD and then converting to Xvid/mpeg4, etc. is what I am referring to.

I realize that RAID won't help conversions unless there are multiple volumes - my question revolved around how many volumes to have - I'm not considering having only one volume - did you even read my post?
 
Yes, I read your post. I realize you weren't considering a single volume. But I like to address all the possible scenarios; someone may have a similar problem at some point, search, and find this thread. Thus, I can help not only you, but other people with similar problems.

Is there a reason you're being so confrontational about this whole thing? Asking for input that's EXPLAINED seems a bit hostile.

In any case. I'd run a pair of raid 0 arrays; OS and swap on one, games and whatnot on the other. Documents and music etc scattered about haphazardly. :p

 
Explained input is helpful to others who may see this thread, and I generally dislike it when people post one-word replies for this very reason. I'm usually the other guy using the search function trying to learn something useful, and '2x RAID 0 ftw' doesn't exactly present a concrete argument.

I appreciate your suggestion though.
 
nitrobass24 said:
I dont know what would be the best choice a lot of it is preference i would suggest option #2 because a RAID-0 only increases write performance not read performance. So if you do a lot of video encoding/writing video to file i would do that to a RAID-0 setup but as far as the other things i dont see there being any performance benefit. I would probably set up a RAID-0 for video encoding and i might put the swap file on there. I would take the other two and span them into a single 320GB drive.
Click to expand...

I do not understand why I would want to span two drives instead of creating a RAID 0. By spanning, I will negate any possible benefits of using the two drives for separate functions at the same time, and by not RAID'ing I will ensure that no additional write/read performance is gained from this sacrifice. This seems like a lose/lose situation, and is probably the last thing I would consider doing from any standpoint. Your logic escapes me.

As for RAID 0 only speeding up writes and not reads, I don't know where you're getting that information, but I suggest you look elsewhere.
 
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