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**gaming performance increase with 2 hard drives?**

P

Pilsnerpete

Platinum Member
I wonder, Has ne1 seen any benchmarks of a system with the OS on the 1st drive and the game installed on the 2nd? (if so, I'll reinstall!!)
Also, I'm curious if there is a noticeable difference if the they're both on the same IDE channel or if they're on separate ones.
I have an ATA33 cdrw on the 2nd. both hdd's are ata100. thanks!!

Pete
 
You could probably fit this in GH 🙂

If you have the game installed on the primary or secondary drive, once it's loaded into memory performance shouldn't be any different. Load times will obviously be better on the faster drive. If you don't have enough system memory to fit the entire level into memory at once, having the virtual memory page file or the game installed on a faster disk will help. Separating the page file reduces drive thrashing and fragmentation greatly enhancing disk performance, but a memory upgrade goes alot farther by reducing the need for a page file.

Anyway, running an ATA33 drive on the same cable can affect performance in a few ways. As a slave, it will slow down the master drive when both drives are being accessed. In some older systems, both drives will run in ATA33 mode. The primary bottleneck is the sustained transfer speeds and unless you are running in ATA33 mode, you're still gonna hit it regardless of your setup so I wouldn't worry about it too much. Just run them on separate channels if you can and if you can't just pair an optical drive with the secondary one (They probably won't be accessed simultaneously during a game unless the page file is on the secondary drive).
 
I have 2 20gig Hd's and 2 optical drives...

Would it be better to place both the HD's on an IDE channel,

or have 1-HD and 1-optical drive on each IDE channel?

thanks 🙂
 
Generally it's not reccomended that you have a CD/DVD and a HD on the same IDE channel, tends to kill performance.
 
I've seen it both ways! "Don't put 2 hard drives together; it'll kill performance." "Don't put a ata33 device on the same channel as a ata100 device or you will pay!" I say, "Don't put anything on either controller."😛


Pete
 
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