Hi all,
a week ago I decided to finally replace my 2 years old PIII600EB on Abit SH6 /served me well, but started to show its age/. I did some reading and research, and while originally been considering to build Athlon XP1800+ system with DDR and corresponding board with built-in ATA133 RAID, I decided to go with Intel parts instead while I was in the shop yesterday (decided to buy in retail after my lately miserable experiences with the on-line ordering, and ended up with the following configuration after rather short 5 minutes thinking and checking store shelves:
Intel P4 1.6GHz A "Northwood" 512kb L2 cache /boxed with orig. fan&sink/
Intel D850MV (L) motherboard /with audio, LAN, ATA100, 850 chipset/
512 RDRAM PC-800 Samsung non-ECC (2x256MB)
IBM Deskstar 7200rpm 60GXP 60GB HDD (ATA100)
Antec SX1030 tower 300W
Windows XP Professional OEM
....this package came a few bucks over $1000 /with tax/. More than I thought to spent that day. And no tweaking on this motherboard.
....plus from my older machine I added PNY Verto GeForce3Ti200 64MB, SONY CRX175 CDRW 24/10/40x and ASUS 50x CD-ROM to complete the machine.....
After assembling, uneventful WinXP installation and load of the latest drivers plus BIOS flash I run a couple of tests including SANDRA, and a few games /MSFS2002 & OperationFlashpoint; good performance in both/. The overall performance results in SANDRA are not bad neither/while my system beats XP Athlons 1800+ heavily in memory benchmark, the Athlons are way faster in CPU benches; this is what I kinda expected/.
What bothers me is really the drive performance. As I said before, I originally wanted RAID 0 with 2 Maxtor 40GB ATA 133 drives, on ATA133 RAID controller built in the motherboard (had a few Athlon boards in mind they have those, or at least ATA100 RAID's). While I was hoping that this IBM 60GXP will somehow run fast enough, I feel disappointed when I see results in benches of about 1/2 to maybe 2/3 (on freshly defragmented drive) speed compared to average ATA100 RAID 0 systems... Also, the real life performance, while not too slow, is not exactly "sizzling" speed.
My question then is: should I go back to store, and get HighPoint ATA133 RAID PCI card (not sure really if it's compatible with my setup) with 2 Maxtors 40GB-ATA133 (while returning the IBM, which is ATA100 only), and would this card work OK with my motherboard? Or some other RAID controller? I'd really like faster drive performance..... but don't really want to pay more than another extra $150-200, even now I went over my original $800 budget. Didn't tell wife yet neither
Also, is there anything else to consider? This system seems to be pretty stable now (should be when the core is all Intel); would I have bigger chances for screw-up if I'll start to experiment with add-on RAID? That is what worries me; since Intel doesn't offer not only any boards with RAID, but neither regular IDE with ATA133; just plain ATA100.
Btw, I have some other spare drives (but only 5400rpm I think; 40GB WD and 15GB Maxtor), maybe to use them as striped dynamic volume in WinXP could help a bit? I have now partitioned that IBM60GXP as single NTFS partiton, is it OK that way (been told that WinXP handles large partitions better)? Or maybe to get Western Digital WD1000JB (WD1000BB Special Edition) with 8MB buffer, could that drive give the kick I'm missing now?
Thx for any ideas in advance, and appologize for a longer post 🙂
Dave
a week ago I decided to finally replace my 2 years old PIII600EB on Abit SH6 /served me well, but started to show its age/. I did some reading and research, and while originally been considering to build Athlon XP1800+ system with DDR and corresponding board with built-in ATA133 RAID, I decided to go with Intel parts instead while I was in the shop yesterday (decided to buy in retail after my lately miserable experiences with the on-line ordering, and ended up with the following configuration after rather short 5 minutes thinking and checking store shelves:
Intel P4 1.6GHz A "Northwood" 512kb L2 cache /boxed with orig. fan&sink/
Intel D850MV (L) motherboard /with audio, LAN, ATA100, 850 chipset/
512 RDRAM PC-800 Samsung non-ECC (2x256MB)
IBM Deskstar 7200rpm 60GXP 60GB HDD (ATA100)
Antec SX1030 tower 300W
Windows XP Professional OEM
....this package came a few bucks over $1000 /with tax/. More than I thought to spent that day. And no tweaking on this motherboard.
....plus from my older machine I added PNY Verto GeForce3Ti200 64MB, SONY CRX175 CDRW 24/10/40x and ASUS 50x CD-ROM to complete the machine.....
After assembling, uneventful WinXP installation and load of the latest drivers plus BIOS flash I run a couple of tests including SANDRA, and a few games /MSFS2002 & OperationFlashpoint; good performance in both/. The overall performance results in SANDRA are not bad neither/while my system beats XP Athlons 1800+ heavily in memory benchmark, the Athlons are way faster in CPU benches; this is what I kinda expected/.
What bothers me is really the drive performance. As I said before, I originally wanted RAID 0 with 2 Maxtor 40GB ATA 133 drives, on ATA133 RAID controller built in the motherboard (had a few Athlon boards in mind they have those, or at least ATA100 RAID's). While I was hoping that this IBM 60GXP will somehow run fast enough, I feel disappointed when I see results in benches of about 1/2 to maybe 2/3 (on freshly defragmented drive) speed compared to average ATA100 RAID 0 systems... Also, the real life performance, while not too slow, is not exactly "sizzling" speed.
My question then is: should I go back to store, and get HighPoint ATA133 RAID PCI card (not sure really if it's compatible with my setup) with 2 Maxtors 40GB-ATA133 (while returning the IBM, which is ATA100 only), and would this card work OK with my motherboard? Or some other RAID controller? I'd really like faster drive performance..... but don't really want to pay more than another extra $150-200, even now I went over my original $800 budget. Didn't tell wife yet neither
Also, is there anything else to consider? This system seems to be pretty stable now (should be when the core is all Intel); would I have bigger chances for screw-up if I'll start to experiment with add-on RAID? That is what worries me; since Intel doesn't offer not only any boards with RAID, but neither regular IDE with ATA133; just plain ATA100.
Btw, I have some other spare drives (but only 5400rpm I think; 40GB WD and 15GB Maxtor), maybe to use them as striped dynamic volume in WinXP could help a bit? I have now partitioned that IBM60GXP as single NTFS partiton, is it OK that way (been told that WinXP handles large partitions better)? Or maybe to get Western Digital WD1000JB (WD1000BB Special Edition) with 8MB buffer, could that drive give the kick I'm missing now?
Thx for any ideas in advance, and appologize for a longer post 🙂
Dave
