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Increase in performance from hard drives

R

Rebel Nugget

Member
I'm in the process of buildling a new computer and I'm hung up on a few things. I've got a fairly large budget (around $2700 and I don't need any peripherals) but I can't decide whether buying some really fast hard drives like baracudas or raptors is worth it. I've got two fairly knowledgable friends and one thinks that they would make a huge difference and the other says it's a waste of money. Do any of you think there would be a noticable difference from getting some run of the mill hard drives to some crazy fast ones?

I don't know if it is dependent on the rest of the system. But I'll probably be getting either the 3500+ .90nm cpu and the Gigabyte K8NXP-9 mobo (anyone know when that is going to be available, by the way?).

Thanks,
Rebel Nugget
 
This is one of the most informative articles I have ever read on anandtech

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2101

If I had a $2700 budget, I would probably use a single raptor, and then use another larger cheaper hard disk. There are a lot of nice extras you can get for $2700, and raid 0 doesn't seem to boost performance much at all.
 
Originally posted by: RadiclDreamer
With that kind of budget, it doesnt really make sense not to get a couple SATA Raptors @ 10k rpm and do raid 0
Click to expand...

If and when you decide to do a Raid 0 configuration, make sure you have a good backup policy in place. If one or the other drives fail you lose ALL your data. Raid 0 is not worth it. Just my 2 cents.
 
With that type of money, you should be using SCSI. The just becoming available next generation SCSI drives put a beating on the Raptor, and will undoubtedly give a tangible performance boost over run of the mill 7200RPM ATA drives. Small SCSI boot drive, large ATA drive for storage is the best setup. Your budget should be able to handle that pretty easily.
 
With that kind of budget, you can go all out. Time for my obligatory RAID 5 plug now. 😀

Promise SX4000, or maybe the SX6000 if you want six drives. There's also a SATA version, I think it's the S150 or something like that. Then get 4 hard drives (up to 6 if the SX6000), and run them in RAID 5. Get a good case too; I have the Antec SLK3700AMB. It has space for all the drives, and a fan to keep them cool, as 7200rpm drives get pretty toasty. Just be aware, the SX6000 is a "full-length" PCI card, while the 4000 is just a really long card. The case must support full-length cards; the SLK3700 does not.
I used a 128MB stick of PC133 ECC RAM as the buffer for the SX4000.

Anyway, a RAID 5 setup will give you a lot of performance - with just 4 drives, it can nearly saturate a 33MHz PCI bus. And you get redundancy.
AIDA32's hard drive benchmark utility gives a speed of 93.7MB/sec with a random read, and 104.7MB/sec buffered. PCI's limit is 133MB/sec at 33MHz. A 6-drive RAID 5 array would probably be too much.

A quick load-time test I just ran:
8MB buffer 200GB Naxtor drive took 32 seconds to load Ulead Videostudio 8. The 4 drive (Hitachi, 8MB buffer, 160GB each, for a total storage space of 480GB) RAID 5 setup took 15 seconds.
 
I think without going overboard, 2 74 raptors is what you need. You can always get an additional hard drive to store files and games and use the raptors in raid 0 for the operating system and programs.

Hard drive performance makes a huge difference. Since it is by far the slowest component in the system (besides a floppy drive), the snappiness of your system will be most affected by the speed of the hard drive (assuming you have more than 512mb of ram and a decent cpu). Therefore, I'd get the Rators since they are $160 a piece after MIR on Newegg.
 
i noticed better performance from my old drives (5400 2mb) to my new drive (7200 8mb), i would assume the faster drives have faster performance, but i can't say for sure as i have not met someone personally who uses them.

If you have that large of a budget, i wouldn't blow it all right away, but save perhaps 700 dollars to upgrade things like harddrives and replace things as the case may be.
If noise is an issue (which it is for me) i would stay away from the faster drives, or be prepared to do some real work to silence the drives.
 
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