Increasing SATA II HD Performance

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Sunin

[H]ard|DCer of the Month - August 2008
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So I've got a system that is pretty decent, in specs below and i wanted to maximize my HD performance for games. I did the onboard raid - 0 with twin Raptor 150's and the performance is lack luster. So I wanted to explore the option of adding two-three more raptors and raiding them.

Which raid setup is going to offer the most throughput. if I can get close to 5x75mb/s read/write then I'd be fairly happy. I'm not at all concerned about fault tolerance, just want speed!

I have a spare PCI-E slot on my EVGA 680i and was tossing around the idea of a putting in a raid controller card for SATA II drivres. This would take the burden off the CPU and offer more options. Also what would be the impact on seek times?

1st, I did a search, with very little to be gathered
2nd, Is there a better approach then the way I am heading
3rd, Is there a good raid guide out there, I'll google this shortly
4th, What type of performance gains might I get?

I'm running games that have huge textures that need to be loaded quickly
 
Run a single drive and run your games and everything else from the other drive, you will see much better speeds and resources for your games. Raid0 can in fact hurt your performance and your motherboard controller may be eating resources to get that array working that could be used for other applications such as games.
 
1st. I mentioned buying a raid card, thus minimizing resources as the card should do much of the juggling.

2nd. Combination of performance should be throughput and seek times no?
 
Sunin said:
2nd. Combination of performance should be throughput and seek times no?
Click to expand...

To a certain extent, but it's not that simple. Cache algorithms can make a big difference; if your program requests a little bit of data, then goes and gets something else, then gets another chunk from the first location, it'll be a lot faster if the disk decided to cache that chunk. How did it know to cache that block? Well, that's why they make the big bucks.
 
but we would be talking 4-5 150G raptors. These drives have been known to have 4ms seek and sustained transfers in the 75MB/s range...
 
Sunin said:
1st. I mentioned buying a raid card, thus minimizing resources as the card should do much of the juggling.

2nd. Combination of performance should be throughput and seek times no?
Click to expand...

1: Not always the case. Only a good raid card will, so expect to spend around 200-400 dollars for one. If you want a cheap one, expect it to eat at your resources much more than a regular drive plugged in would.

2: Not always the case.

Sunin said:
but we would be talking 4-5 150G raptors. These drives have been known to have 4ms seek and sustained transfers in the 75MB/s range...
Click to expand...

Just because they are raptors, they aren't going to do many magical things for you. Yes they are fast drives, but don't expect to see a leap of performance, you may see little if none at all. Now if you were to run a specific type of server or an application, then this can make a huge difference... but for regular home desktop style computing, don't hold your breath.
 
Vanguard is loading huge texture files, and I'd really like to eliminate the hitching when it loads new textures.
 
Sunin said:
but we would be talking 4-5 150G raptors. These drives have been known to have 4ms seek and sustained transfers in the 75MB/s range...
Click to expand...

Well, 4ms seek plus 4ms rotational latency. Putting things in raid-0 tends to hurt that latency, though, so you might (depending on workload) be better off with a single Raptor than four of them.

Vanguard seems to be an online game. Are you sure the lag isn't just your internet connection? How big is the game? Would it fit on a ramdisk so you could test your theory?
 
620KB D/L 128KB U/L DSL. I never have lag due to my Inet... it hitches in towns where you get a lot of textures loading and upon chunking which forces loading of new textures...

So really some sort of device like FusionIO is really the only thing that will make me happy it seems!

I probably un raid-0 my two raptors and see if performance increases! maybe keep the swap file on 1, and the game on another with the 74gig raptor housing the O/S....
 
Sunin said:
620KB D/L 128KB U/L DSL. I never have lag due to my Inet... it hitches in towns where you get a lot of textures loading and upon chunking which forces loading of new textures...
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Or perhaps because there are other people whose attributes need to be loaded. Are you asserting that it's not your internet connection because you've tested that that's not what's causing it (either bring your machine to a faster connection, or try a friend's machine at your house - either would be instructional) or because you think that's probably not the problem?
Sunin said:
So really some sort of device like FusionIO is really the only thing that will make me happy it seems!
Click to expand...
Probably. But I think you'd be happier if you spent the money elsewhere.
Sunin said:
I probably un raid-0 my two raptors and see if performance increases! maybe keep the swap file on 1, and the game on another with the 74gig raptor housing the O/S....
Click to expand...
That's a good idea. You might even try raid 1 if you get a chance; if it's loading small blocks that might actually go faster.
 
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