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Question Around Multitasking

W

waterboy787

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 20, 2001
Messages
324
All,

This is more of a noob question. But I wanted to get people's take.

I currently download a lot and unpack a lot of files while I using my PC as well. I experience a lot of slowdown (e.g. when I click something it takes a while) and I'm presuming its because my hard drive is being accessed a lot during downloads and moving files, etc. What would be the best way to mitigate this performance? (And I know a dual-core cpu would help, but I just bought this proc).

1. Get another new hard drive so one will be used for downloading and other separate from the OS?
2. Get more ram (i.e. 2 gbs)
3. It's inevitable that it slows down.

SYstem SPecs
Nforce 3 MSI neo2
AMD64 Venice 3200+
1 gigabyte (2x512) ballistix ddr
1 16mb cache Maxtor Drive (IDE)

Thanks in advance.
 
You're two bottlenecks are going to be harddrive and processor for unpacking. More harddrive than processor. A second drive will help for sure. If you do alot more than one unpacking at a time it'll turn towards major harddrive bottle neck and minor cpu.
 
A second CPU/core would always be helpful but if you only have one HD that will by far be your biggest bottleneck. I'd say get a 10k rpm drive or something with a high spindle speed/low seek time. If you're unpacking something that uses the same HD that windows is installed onto you're asking for a slowdown.
 
While I agree that adding a second spindle is a good idea, I think it should be the biggest 7200RPM drive you can afford, with an eye on platterdensity and transfer rates. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.8 has 133GB platters, allowing it to cook through linear reads faster than most any other desktop drive. Samsung's P120 series and Hitachi T7K250 are also pretty zippy when performing linear transfers, the overriding pattern in your work. Also, a 7200RPM drive gets you much more capacity at much less cost than a 10K drive.
 
Great insight. SO it looks like a Seagate then. Umm, if I go with a Seagate, which would should be my primary (OS) drive? My old IDE maxtor or the seagate? My plans are to use the secondary drive as the downloader/unpacking.

So I'm assuming a WD Raptor 74gb wouldn't be worth it in my case? Since I've read around, and it looks like hte Raptors have marginal performance gains and just slightly faster access times.


Thank you all.
 
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