Gaming Hard Drives

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: oldman420
i have this theory involving sata and windows stability. in my system at least, i got lots of stutter and poor overall performance in gaming. i removed all sata from my system just to test, and the stutter is gone. other things seem more stable too i used to get explorer crashes 2-3 times daily and now since im running on ide drives things are better no crashes yet. i know that my hardware was good, siig ,and wd so either i am an idiot or sata kinda bogs down everything in xp. i think that future generations of sata will be more stable but for now if you want speed get a cheeta scsi drive. scsi works great with windows!!!

It's pretty well-known that first-generation SATA products and specifications, can have noise problems, because of the lack of shielded cables. My guess is that you are having noise problems resulting in cable CRC errors and data xfer re-tries. Either that, or SATA host controller driver problems.

 

[oldman420]

i think its the siig chipset but im not sure as i have never tried promise before

 

[Vonkhan]

I have 2 x 74GB Raptors in RAID0 and a WD 250GB SATA ... life has never been so good XP starts up in a flash, game levels load up before I get a chance to even sip on my drink and I never have to uninstall any game to make space for my mp3z & appz

 

[kef7]

I almost impulsively picked up a 74g raptor at Microcenter tonight but the retail price is way too high; oh well--my 36g raptor is fine for now.

BTW--Microcenter Sales guy really know his stuff: twice he said that the raptor is a scsi drive and he claims he owns one! LOL

 

[oldman420]

Originally posted by: kef7
I almost impulsively picked up a 74g raptor at Microcenter tonight but the retail price is way too high; oh well--my 36g raptor is fine for now.

BTW--Microcenter Sales guy really know his stuff: twice he said that the raptor is a scsi drive and he claims he owns one! LOL

well windows sees a raptor as a scsi drive, maybe thats what he meant

 

[Nebor]

Originally posted by: Chaotic42

Originally posted by: DemiSheep
As well as my two hard drives I ordered I also ordered a motherboard/CPU and 1GB of memory..... So it shouldnt need much of a swap file..

It'll use a swap file whether you need it or not. Expect about 1GB of your system drive to be taken from you. 1GB isn't as much memory as it seems.

So you're advising 2GB for a midrange system?

 

[oldman420]

i am not possitive but i think a gig of ram is fine for just about any home system, servers can use more but they need it and not for speed but to get more work done as for a swap file you can manualy control this if you do have tons of ram. i have set my pf to 0 and watched xp slow to a crawl even with a gig of ram onboard. but found that if i set it at 250 megs everything works fine. so it seems that the way software is written you kind of need a page file and i am sure that many 3d games buffer textures and such on the pf for smoother performance. so why worry about it its part of life. you can also set the paging file to whatwver drive you wish too.