Dual Core Performance or HD issue?

Mango1970

Member
Aug 26, 2006
195
0
76
Hi all,

I have a general question and I placed here in the CPU area as I believe it pertains to this section although if it gets moved no worries.

I currently have 2 comps, one a C2D e6600 and an AMD-x2-4800+ (939). I routinely work on very large files. I communicate with a few of my offices that share very large files. We routinely have files that are over 5 GIGs. Anyhow when we all access these files we have them broken down in smaller parts using winrar. Anyhow when I go and rebuild these I use quickpar to make sure they are not corrutp and rebuild them.

When I check and rebuild these files using par, I am also checking mail, surfing, listening to musing, unraring something else, maybe working on other video feeds. My computer with dual core just CRAWLS. What I am asking is, is this from the fact that I am doing all this from ONE hardrive. In my case a 200GB IDE drive. In other words I paring, unraring, raring, surfing, saving etc all from one drive.

I check the usage of my CPU's and in most cases the dual cores are being used both at the same times but they are never at 100, heck they are usually at 20-40%. So again I guess I am wondering would I benefit from a better processor or should I get a second drive and try to work from one drive o the other or go say to SATA so I have distinct channels??

Is this a CPU issue, or a hard drive issue or what? I have 4 GIGS or RAM.

Whenever I play games I never experience any slowdowns so that's why it confuses me that this would tax my system so much. One of our tech guys said we should have RAID drives but again I wonder as I would still be going from ONE drive to the SAME drive.. thus doing al this on one channel and one drive.. reading? writing all at the same time to the same drive so is this the issue?

Thanks!
Bob
 

stevty2889

Diamond Member
Dec 13, 2003
7,036
8
81
Working with those large files is mainly going to be a hard drive limit. You would likely benifit from having a second hard drive. SATA in reallity isn't that much faster than IDE, and neither of those CPU's would be a limiter.
 

coolpurplefan

Golden Member
Mar 2, 2006
1,243
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0
I read RAID 0 helps. You're better off using the exact same model hard drive though.

I actually bought two Samsung SP2514 for two seperate machines so I can do RAID 0 later on if I buy another HD. :)
 

Conky

Lifer
May 9, 2001
10,709
0
0
That sounds like a HD issue for sure. I deal with large files like that quite often and I unpack/unrar them to a separate HD and it doesn't take very long at all even with IDE drives.