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A few questions

C

cyates

Junior Member
1) I setup a raid0 with two 80gig maxtor drives. 7200rpm, 8mb cache. I used 64KB block size. Is this the best setup for gaming? In particular level load times and such.

2) If I were to add more drives to the raid0, would it increase performance because the striping band has more hdd's? Or would it just increase the capacity?

3) I'm new to overclocking video cards. I tried using rage3d to overclock my radeon 9800PRO. But when I increase the core/memory clock speed I end up getting distortions and weird geometry glitches in games. I have the Antec Cyclone Blower right under the video card. Shouldn't I be able to overclock just a little bit? Would the distortions/glitches go away if the card was cooled more?

4) I'm using XP home. Would going to XP pro increase performance or stability?

Thanks a bunch!
-
Chris
 
1.) I think most people recommend 16K or 32K for home use.

2.) Yes, performance will increase with each drive you add to a RAID 0, but at a certain point it will become negligible.

3.) The distortions and glitches you're getting, commonly known as artifacting, is a sure sign that your videocard is overclocked too high, especially if you don't get them when your card is not overclocked. Just remember that overclocking is never guaranteed, and it's possible that your 9800Pro won't overclock at all. How high were you pushing it?

4.) XP Pro is essentially the same thing as XP Home with some extra features that most home users don't need (e.g. SMP support, networking stuff, etc.) You're not going to get an increase in performance or stability by switching from one to the other.
 
Note though with RAID 0 the chance for losing all data increases with every drive that you add, since one drive failing destroys all files. The chance of failure isn't quite double, triple, etc. but it is close to that. There are a set of Frequently Asked Questions docs on the main AT site that includes a RAID FAQ.
 
Performance on a standard RAID controller won't necessarily go up by adding drives. This is due to the limitations of the ATA standard. Only one drive can be active and transferring data to or from the controller at a time, per channel. So two drives on the same cable are limited by this; only one drive can be active at once, so they have to switch back and forth. Effectively the throughput is then limited to the speed of a single drive, so in a RAID array with 4 drives, 2 per cable, the throughput is still only that of 2 drives. However there is some performance increase because the controller can send commands to both drives at the same time, it's only the actual data transfer that is limited.

Some controllers like the Promise TX4000 use 4 separate channels, rather than 2 channels supporting 2 devices each, so that all four drives can be active at once. But most controllers don't do that, as it is expensive to implement.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/promise-tx2000.html

As you can see in that article, performance varies greatly depending on what actual operations are being done. Unfortunately they don't come up with much of a "conclusion" as to how to set things up and how it affects normal non-benchmarking usage.
 
If you re-load the same levels a lot (like maps that go in a cycle, or lots of saves & restores) then it would probably be smart to pick up as much RAM as you can afford. WinXP will use it to cache data that you've used, including maps, for quick re-use later. And RAM is much faster than even RAID0. So the second time loading a map should be quick. How much RAM do you have presently, and what's your system like?

Welcome to the Forums, by the way 😎
 
Wow, thanks for the response guys. This is some good information.

Shooters, RE answer 1: Should I go through the trouble of re-creating the array to go down to 16 or 32? What difference would I see? Is there a harm in staying at 64K? Thanks!

Shooters, RE answer 3: Just increasing the core/memory a little bit would cause glitches to appear. The higher I went the more distortion. 400mhz core and 350mhz memory would cause glitches also. I figured this antec cyclone fan would enable me to overclock at least 5%.

Dave: I will read that FAQ soon, thanks.

Evermore: Thanks for additional info on that. I'll probably just stick with the two drives, one for each ide channel.

mechBgon: Thanks for welcome! As to your question, I'm just now putting this together and the extra ram is the last thing I need to get, but here are the specs:

Motherboard: Asus P4P800 Deluxe
CPU: P4 2.8ghz 800FSB OC'd to 3.06
Memory: OCZ 256MB PC3200
HDD (2x): Maxtor 80GIG 7200RPM 8MB cache
Video: Radeon 9800 Pro
Sound: SB Audigy 1

I am planning on getting another OCZ 256Meg to goto 512...but would it be worth it to goto 1gig ram? Would I see a difference in load times between 512 and 1gig?

Thanks again guys!
 
Totally go to 1Gb of RAM, yeah. 2 x 512Mb. I would be avoiding OCZ and go with Corsair XMS. If you want to maximize your OCability, Corsair has just coughed up modules particularly aimed at the Springdale & Canterwood boards, TwinX 3700. Probably pricey, I haven't priced it out yet. Ok, well now I have... $320 for 1Gb (2 matched 512's).
 
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