Faster hard drive make a difference if..

[keichan82]

I were to raid 0 two Cheetah 15k RPM?

Will I notice the difference in gaming and in loading up the comp?

I was thinking about it and just maybe...

I was told that raid 0 for 2 raptors only gains 5 - 10 % speed but the SCSI Cheetah 15k will gain about 25 - 50 % speed.. is it worth it?

 

[imported_Kensai]

Not to me personally. 15K drives are just too expensive to be practical to me.

 

[keichan82]

The price of the drive is alright but the SCSI adapter are killer!! I was told that it would cost more than 100$..
is that trus or they just trying to rip me off?

U320
64 Pin

 

[Fern]

I was looking at scsi a little while ago, but gave up. The problem seemed to me that to really get the speed increases you need a PCI-x slot (basically a regular PCI slot, but it run at 66mhz instead of 33).

I was looking at this adapter: LSIU160, its way less than $100 IIRC

 

[keichan82]

would it run slower if I used a pci slot instead of pci-x slot?
also, its a u320.. I looked all over the web and the cheapest i found was 140$.. where are you getting the 100$ price tag?

 

[robisc]

What is it to be used for? Because I think that the "feel" of the PCs speed increase won't really be noticed, benchmarks will be but not the overall system speed, Raptors IMO are not even worth the price increase, with all other PC components as fast as they are incremental HW speed increases aren't as easily noticed as they used to be, PC components are so fast now that they are at the point of "diminishing return" So for the money will you really be able to see the differnece, IMO probably not.

 

[MobiusPizza]

hm but 1 thing is right; HDD is still the bottleneck of a system.
It depends on what you do;

Gaming? you wouldn't notice it
Video editing? probably

But since you are raiding 2 raptors already; the performance increase in getting even faster HDD are nopt practical.

 

[Sunner]

No need to do RAID-0, a single 15K SCSI drive will smoke any IDE drive, mostly due to it's extremely low latency(compared to 7.2K drives).
And you don't need PCI-X (which is not a 66 MHz regular PCI slot, PCI-X is 64 bits wide and up to 533 MHz in speed), a regular PCI bus will handle 133 MB/Sec in theory, more like 100-120 MB/Sec in reality, but either is more than even the fastest drives will transfer.

For this same reason you don't really need an U320 card, just go for an U160 card, supposedly there's an LSI card available at around $40, don't know where though, since I don't love in the US, and hence don't keep up to date with US stores

 

[Gamingphreek]

Originally posted by: Sunner
No need to do RAID-0, a single 15K SCSI drive will smoke any IDE drive, mostly due to it's extremely low latency(compared to 7.2K drives).
And you don't need PCI-X (which is not a 66 MHz regular PCI slot, PCI-X is 64 bits wide and up to 533 MHz in speed), a regular PCI bus will handle 133 MB/Sec in theory, more like 100-120 MB/Sec in reality, but either is more than even the fastest drives will transfer.

For this same reason you don't really need an U320 card, just go for an U160 card, supposedly there's an LSI card available at around $40, don't know where though, since I don't love in the US, and hence don't keep up to date with US stores

The PCI Bus may have enough bandwidth but remember that is not the only thing running on that bus. Since that is a Via chipset the Gigabit and other lan port are run off of PCI bus as well as audio and anything else hooked up. You will see a large performance increase with PCI-X. RAID-0 isn't going to really do anything for you. What are you doing that requires a 15k drive or RAID in the first place. If you think it will speed your games up... nope it isn't going to do that much.

Not worth it for what you are doing.

-Kevin

 

[Sunner]

Originally posted by: Gamingphreek

Originally posted by: Sunner
No need to do RAID-0, a single 15K SCSI drive will smoke any IDE drive, mostly due to it's extremely low latency(compared to 7.2K drives).
And you don't need PCI-X (which is not a 66 MHz regular PCI slot, PCI-X is 64 bits wide and up to 533 MHz in speed), a regular PCI bus will handle 133 MB/Sec in theory, more like 100-120 MB/Sec in reality, but either is more than even the fastest drives will transfer.

For this same reason you don't really need an U320 card, just go for an U160 card, supposedly there's an LSI card available at around $40, don't know where though, since I don't love in the US, and hence don't keep up to date with US stores

The PCI Bus may have enough bandwidth but remember that is not the only thing running on that bus. Since that is a Via chipset the Gigabit and other lan port are run off of PCI bus as well as audio and anything else hooked up. You will see a large performance increase with PCI-X. RAID-0 isn't going to really do anything for you. What are you doing that requires a 15k drive or RAID in the first place. If you think it will speed your games up... nope it isn't going to do that much.

Not worth it for what you are doing.

-Kevin

True I didn't look at the mobo, I just thought everyone and their mother bought nForce mobos these days

 

[Calin]

If you have really really big files to read/write to disk, a RAID will help. Other than that, practically you are waiting only for the access time of the drive, the read time will have almost no effect going from one to two drives.
There are people that really need RAID arrays of fast SCSI drives. Chances are you're not one of them

 

[Calin]

Originally posted by: Calin
If you have really really big files to read/write to disk, a RAID will help. Other than that, practically you are waiting only for the access time of the drive, the read time will have almost no effect going from one to two drives.
There are people that really need RAID arrays of fast SCSI drives. Chances are you're not one of them

For gaming, more RAM will have much more effect than a faster hard drive. However, if you are using software RAID, going to a single disk will help with speed (no more processing power needed for RAID things)