New Setup and Partition Scheme

S

Sandbox Magician

Limp Gawd
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Mar 4, 2005
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On previous builds I've been more focused on gaming components, but on my next build I want to focus on storage. This system I'm going to be doing a lot of ripping and downloading/unraring, and I'm not sure what kind of setup I should go with.

I'm stuck because I want to have performance for video editing and ripping, but I'm going to need a lot of storage too.

Should I go with 2 raptors w/ raid0 and a cheap hdd for storage? Should I go with 1 raptor for OS/apps and another hdd for swap partition and storage? Or am I making a big deal out of nothing and just get 2 larger seagates and put them in raid0?

If you were going to be doing a lot of writing and a lot of storage what would you go with?
 
I'd go with 2 drives, one for the OS/apps/games, and a second for data storage. Make sure they are both good drives with 16 MB cache. I'm not a big fan of RAID on the desktop, and I've yet to see real world results that show anything noticeable, much less anything to justify the potential data loss. I tried RAIDing my two WD drives together, and wasn't very impressed to be honest in real, actual usage.
 
Okay, so does going with maybe one raptor and then a cheap TB sound good?

Should I put the swap on the larger hdd, when downloading/ripping write to the raptor, and then transfer over for long term storage?

Or would I see a gain by downloading/ripping straight to the large hdd reducing the load on the raptor for normal tasks? I'm going to be downloading/ripping constantly, so should I keep swap/temp on the raptor and dedicate the larger hdd to the constant writing?
 
I'm toying around with some partitioning ideas too.

I have an old 74GB Raptor. It currently contains a 20GB partition for my OS/apps and a 54GB partition for my games.

I was doing some research on drive performance, especially with newer 7200RPM drives. And it basically convinced me that the very large hard drives with dense platters could provide performance on par or better than my Raptor. Example, my Raptor has two 37GB platters and HD Tach sequential read performance drops likes a rock the further from the outer platter edges the drive head gets. The Samsung Spinpoint F1 has three platters of 334GB each. And it's HD Tach sequential read performance is far above the Raptors. But the Raptor wins in random access tests easily of course.

Anyway, this got me thinking. My game partition on the Raptor is on the slower side of the disk (middle and inner edge of platter). So I bought the 1TB Samsung Spinpoint F1 with the very dense platters. I'm going to keep my OS partition on the Raptor. And then use about 150GB partition at the beginning of the Spinpoint drive for my games. Then the rest gets used for one or two storage partitions.

This seems ideal for me. Because I'm probably not going to access the game and storage partitions at the same time. But there is high probability the OS/apps and game partitions could both be accessed while I'm gaming, and those two being on separate hard drives would be beneficial to performance. And my game partition being on the outer edge of a large drive with three dense platters, means the sequential read and write access will be far above the Raptor. And if kept defragmented, the slower random access performance hit could be minimized.

And I also have a couple 400GB Seagate 7200.10 drives which I'll use to schedule backups of my TB drive. Because really, I'd have to kill myself if I lost a terabyte of data.
 
Sandbox Magician said:
Should I put the swap on the larger hdd, when downloading/ripping write to the raptor, and then transfer over for long term storage?
Click to expand...
Generally, you want to leave the swap file alone. Quite a few people aren't updating their way of thinking with many of these tweaks. At one time they had an affect, but OSes are much smarter now. Leaving your swap file on the Raptor would be best. Anytime I'm working on a video, in terms of editing it, I do all of that on my secondary drive.

As for separating games from the main OS directory, there's absolutely no performance benefit from doing so. I've heard people say they install games on another drive to avoid reinstalling, but that seems like laziness to me. I've tried it with a bunch of games, and they all failed to run. SyncToy makes it simple to back up saved game files and config files.
 
Oh for me... With the prices of DDR2 memory being so cheap. I got 4GB... I have a tad over 3GB actually usable under XP. But I figured with 3GB of RAM, there is no need for a swap file. Been running a couple months without one and everything has been just peachy so far.
 
DeaconFrost said:
As for separating games from the main OS directory, there's absolutely no performance benefit from doing so. I've heard people say they install games on another drive to avoid reinstalling, but that seems like laziness to me. I've tried it with a bunch of games, and they all failed to run. SyncToy makes it simple to back up saved game files and config files.
Click to expand...

Why would there be no performance benefit from this though? If the OS or some background tasks needs to access a file at the same time the game is reading a file from the hard drive. On a single disk, the drive head would have to go from one partition to the next. But with two separate drives, with two separate sets of drive heads, this would be done simultaneously.
 
Hard drive performance has no affect on FPS in games or anything like that. Loading times also wouldn't show any real noticeable difference either. If a person is absolutely worried about gaming performance, you worry about the CPU, GPU, and memory, along with make sure your drivers are up to date, configured properly, etc. Video editing is a different beats because of the constant flow of data being written to the drive, needing to maintain a certain amount of "bandwidth", or else the quality degrades. Loading game files isn't the same, and therefore doesn't rely on drive performance like video editing does.

EDIT: I forgot to mention keeping the drive defragged as well for loading performance in games.
 
Well I have a 3.6GHz CPU, an 8800Ultra, 3GB of RAM. So now I want to be sure I can get every tiny bit of performance as I can from the hard drive because it's still the biggest bottleneck.

Yeah, I'm aware FPS won't be impacted, the game will load what it needs into memory. It's those loading times that concern me. Sometimes that happens when you are changing zones and may just be a matter of a couple extra seconds. But some games with large open worlds, you'll also do some loading from the hard drive on the fly. Lord of the Rings Online and Vanguard are a couple of games where hard drive accessing during actual game play creates some stuttering effects.

I'd like to keep that to a minimum, even if the differences are small. So I can't help but think keeping this off the drive with the OS and applications can only be a good thing, even if it's a very tiny good thing. :)
 
As for the swap file, apparently, even if you turn it off, Windows creates one for when it's needed. To my understanding, some things need to be swapped, regardless of what you have it set at. There's a great sticky on the OS forum about it. This is another thing where updated thinking should be applied. Once, everyone thought disabling it was the best. Then, for a long time, setting a static size was best. Now, with the Vista era rushing in, no tweaks are made with it, as the system manages it very well.
 
Ah, the reg hack. I remember all those alleged tweaks that ended up doing nothing for performance. Most of those things in theory sounded great, but in practice really didn't do a thing. I'd be willing to bet if you posted that link in the OS forum, and asked if #19 did anything for you, such as letting you shut off your page file, you'd have more answers with better technical details than I could provide about it.

While you're over there, check out the sticky on page files. Speaking of page files, here's a post from the sticky, showing that even if you still disable the pagefile, things are still being paged.
http://www.hardforum.com/showpost.php?p=1026754354&postcount=17

One of the guys writing that thread is a Windows developer, who works for Microsoft.
 
Data still gets paged. Period.
Don't believe me? Try disabling the page file. Windows will re-enabled it for you after a short amount of time. It's rarely to your benefit to disable it.
As DF already stated- leave the darn thing alone. It's on the highest performance drive you've got.

I actually remember a well done article awhile back for XP (can't seem to find it- remember exactly what the page looked like though), that analyzed this. Sticking the paging file onto a second hard drive had ZERO effect on performance. You just increase your risks of screwing something up by changing it.

Once more- just leave it alone.

You can actually run into far more trouble disabling your swap file. For instance if something eats all your RAM (like a game), XP runs out of RAM... system crashes very quickly. A paging file prevents that as well. More RAM you have, the less it uses paging file anyway, so more more we go back to... Leave it alone.

Faster hard drive (the Raptor) needs to contain your games/apps/OS for best performance. Period. Your bigger drive needs to contain all your data files like pictures, word documents and the like.

Short/Fast/Best/Proven answer? Install the OS and all your "stuff" onto the Raptor. Then use the larger HDD for your data files (do you have a backup plan in mind... another use for that drive)
 
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