Fastest Storage for ~$300.oo

[Polish3d]

Storage is definitely still the greatest performance bottleneck on my machine, as it is with most.


I have about 300 bucks I'd like to put toward improving this situation and would love some suggestions.


I'm kicking around a few ideas, including:


1. Adding 2 more 74gig Raptors for a 4-disc raid array, on the notion that there is a fairly significant performance from a 4 disc raid, if not from a 2 disc array.


2. A solid state drive - Interesting idea, not sure if there is a good one out there to purchase


3. Anything suggested here ...

 

[jkresh]

What is this storage for? If you are going to raid then you need more then $300 as the best way to get performance is to get a legitimate raid card (which will be around $300 by itself). Also a 4 disk raid 0 arrays is really asking for trouble.

 

[Polish3d]

It's primarily a gaming system, and used for school but nothing else super-critical. Perhaps the 150gig Raptor is the way to go then as I'm not really willing to spend the money on a RAID card that costs that much.

Any sites with good info on this would also be greatly appreciated

 

[LikeLinus]

"It's primarily a gaming system"

You will gain no performance advantage from what you have now. Gaming is all about the cpu/ram/gpu.

It'd be a waste of money IMHO. It'd be different if you were doing video editing something that requires that type of disk performance, but gaming doesn't.

 

[Tristor]

Buy a Hitachi Deskstar 7K100 (750GB or 1TB) or two. They are as fast (and in some cases faster than) the raptors, and bigger. Really, if you could swing it (will be more than $300 though), getting two and RAID 1ing them would be your best bet, single drive performance is comparable with raptors, and the only real performance boost RAID0 offers is SRT, which is not a common bottleneck. You only gain 8-10% and lose data integrity, whereas RAID1 offers data integrity with a slightly smaller performance boost over a single-drive configuration. or you could get two more 74GB raptors and do RAID 0+1 (10). Of course, really RAID is sorta silly to bother with using the onboard controller. If Raptors were SATAII instead of SATA150, I think you'd see a huge jump in performance just moving from onboard to a good external controller, you will probably still see a jump in RAID performance though.

Also, what the guy above me said. It doesn't really matter for gaming. The only time disk access matters is level loading times, and the difference between a non-raid and raid setup with fast drives is marginal to say the least.

 

[Polish3d]

I know that the only gaming advantage I'd recieve would be level load times, I do appreciate an uber-fast system overall (boot times, app load times in addition to gaming load times.)


So it seems there really is nothing in the 300 dollar range that would offer a solid performance boost?


I swear I once read an article showing that 4 disks in a raid array (I think it was 4x36g Raptors) was pretty fast compared to a single or dual setup.


Anyone have access to benchmarks with such an array?

 

[jkresh]

Frackal, such an array with a real card (motherboard raid isint that good) would be a lot faster for certain things (unencrypted hd video edditing...) but for load times in games it would save a few seconds at best. You might actually get a bigger improvement by going to 4 gigs of ram as some games can make use of 2 buy themselves and if you have anything running in the background (firewall...) the extra ram will help.