• 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.

Upgrading storage for gaming, need some help.

A

Arioch5

n00b
Joined
Jun 10, 2009
Messages
10
First I wasn't positive which section to put this in, but it's a storage question so I started here.

I'm thinking about upgrading my hard drive in my gaming machine but need some help. I'm currently playing Warhammer Online and would like to be able to take Fraps videos. Also, MMO's are fairly well known for accessing the hard drive during play so something faster would be nice.

Currently I have a single 250GB (I think) hard drive. The first partion has Windows (vista) and is about 70gb. The rest is left for storage. With Vista/War/Fraps all trying to access the same drive fraps is not happening. Additionally the drive has about a 14ms seek time to give you an idea of it's speed.

I would like to shoot for about $150 budget. That's basically enough to pick up a Velociraptor or possibly two cheaper drives in Raid0. If I use raid it would be either my motherboards raid or software whatever you suggest (I'm guessing the motherboard raid is the better optoin).

So where do I go? I'm unsure of weather I buy one drive, two drives in raid 0, what about short stroking two drives that aren't in raid? (I'm not very concerned about HD space except for fraps). I've done a lot of reading but I'm really not sure when it comes to playing an MMO what I need to shoot for.

Would I be best off with 3 total drives putting Swap/WAR/Fraps all on separate drives? Putting the 250GB as Fraps storage, and the other two as cheaper drives short stroked for Vista and Warhammer?
 
How about a WD Vraptor for OS and games. Do like a 60gb partition for the OS. The rest for storage and games.
Take the 250gb and use it for FRAPS storage.
 
You can get 2 x WD 640GB Caviar Blacks and set them up in RAID 0. Short stroke them by setting the first RAID partition to say 300GB. It will be plenty fast. I've done that on my sig rig and I'm plenty happy with it.
 
capreppy said:
You can get 2 x WD 640GB Caviar Blacks and set them up in RAID 0. Short stroke them by setting the first RAID partition to say 300GB. It will be plenty fast. I've done that on my sig rig and I'm plenty happy with it.
Click to expand...

If I set it up like this where would you locate stuff? Would the 300GB raid 0 hold the OS/Swap/ and Warhammer? Then Fraps to the older drive?

Oh I forgot to mention I backup my OS weekly to a NAS so I'm not concerned with losing data with a hard drive failure.

I've read a lot about the WD Blacks, that's what I was thinking sounded the best, but wasn't sure. I'm still curious if Raid Blacks would be faster than each seperate.

Currently it sounds like the suggestions are:
  • 1 new Vraptor for everything, Fraps to old drive
  • 2 WD Blacks in Raid 0 (short stroked), again fraps to old drive
  • 2 WD Blacks(shot stroked), one with Vista, one with War, Fraps to old drive.

Thanks for the comments so far.
 
There are quite a few threads (search back a few months) regarding the WD Blacks Short Stroked & Short Stroked in RAID 0. I read the threads and decided to go with 300GB short stroked. I didn't create a second partition frankly because I don't need the space on that box. It's a dedicated gaming rig and 300GB is more than plenty for me. I've got a WHS for my storage needs.
 
Honestly all of those options are good.
And will all be a huge improvement over what you have now.

Something to ADD:
I would put a swap file on all your drives. That way if one drive is busy it can page the other drive and limit disk contention.
 
I've read on the short stroking of the WD Blacks. My question is more does splitting the Swap/OS drive from the Game's drive make a large performance difference. What I saw seemed to indicate that Raid on the drives will improve throughput but not seek time.

That beeing the case, I would personally expect for gaming that having 2 short stroked drives not in raid would be ideal. Most hard drive access during a game would be random access, correct?
 
nitrobass24 said:
Honestly all of those options are good.
Something to ADD:
I would put a swap file on all your drives. That way if one drive is busy it can page the other drive and limit disk contention.
Click to expand...

Really will windows do this? Access the drive least used or currently not busy for the Swap? This whole swap thing is really the part I'm most unsure of in the setup. My understanding was that if something were in swap on a disk that's where it would read it from even if that drive were busy.
 
well yea if its only in one place it can only read it from there.
But when it does its writes, it will use the other one thats not busy.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top