lower game map load time: 74gb Raptor or 7200rmp drives in Raid 0

[m1ldslide1]

So what I've been wondering is if swapfile performance is increased by having a faster hard drive, such as the raptor??? If seek times and write times on the drive are 50% of what they are on my 7200rpm sataII, then wouldn't the swapfile access/write times be about 50% faster??

Seems like any improvement wouldn't be terribly noticeable or somebody would've blown the lid off it by now. But I'm just wondering?

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: m1ldslide1
So what I've been wondering is if swapfile performance is increased by having a faster hard drive, such as the raptor??? If seek times and write times on the drive are 50% of what they are on my 7200rpm sataII, then wouldn't the swapfile access/write times be about 50% faster??

Seems like any improvement wouldn't be terribly noticeable or somebody would've blown the lid off it by now. But I'm just wondering?

Yes
Yes
Sort of

Yes the time spent accessing the swapfile is decreased by using a faster HD, common sense that isn't it!
I the drive is 50% faster in all ways then the time spent accessing the HD would drop by a third.
Thing is that a 50% increase in speed is a massive increase. Not just a tiny bit but massive. Think going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm and a bit more.

 

[m1ldslide1]

Yes the time spent accessing the swapfile is decreased by using a faster HD, common sense that isn't it!
I the drive is 50% faster in all ways then the time spent accessing the HD would drop by a third.
Thing is that a 50% increase in speed is a massive increase. Not just a tiny bit but massive. Think going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm and a bit more.

Or like going from 7200rpm to 10k rpm?

According to the egg, my WD1600JS latency=4.2ms and seek time=8.9ms. The 74gb raptor latency=3ms and seek time=4.5ms, so the seek time is almost exactly 50% and the latency is 25% less.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: m1ldslide1

Yes the time spent accessing the swapfile is decreased by using a faster HD, common sense that isn't it!
I the drive is 50% faster in all ways then the time spent accessing the HD would drop by a third.
Thing is that a 50% increase in speed is a massive increase. Not just a tiny bit but massive. Think going from 5400rpm to 7200rpm and a bit more.

Or like going from 7200rpm to 10k rpm?

According to the egg, my WD1600JS latency=4.2ms and seek time=8.9ms. The 74gb raptor latency=3ms and seek time=4.5ms, so the seek time is almost exactly 50% and the latency is 25% less.

Yes, your swapfile will be somewhat faster.

But you're taking it from maybe ~1/10000th the speed of your RAM to ~1/5000th the speed. It's still going to be incredibly slow if you are swapping to disk in the middle of running anything. The only way to even get it close in terms of latency is to put your swapfile on an SSD of some sort (CF card, DRAM-based 'hard disk', etc.) that can run at the interface speed, dropping your seek time into the microsecond range.

Generally it's WAY more effective to just add more RAM rather than to try to make your swapfile faster. If 3-4GB of RAM isn't enough to avoid swapping, you're not really running a 'desktop' workload.

 

[m1ldslide1]

Makes perfect sense to me. Thanks much...

 

[Bobthelost]

Seek times aren't as important as you'd think. Most of the time the HD is spent reading and writing not spent seeking, (if you want to learn more on this topic then search for the thread @ storagereviews on seek times in thier forums, very, very detailed.)

You'd also need to double the max/min read/write speeds to get that 50% speed increase. That's not easy to do. Also the step from 5400 to 7200 is less significant than 7200 to 10000 for various technical reasons.

 

[alimoalem]

Originally posted by: ribbon13
Seriously get the WD4000KD if you care about level times in your price range.

:thumbsup:

 

[sygyzy]

Originally posted by: Bobthelost

Originally posted by: ribbon13
Seriously get the WD4000KD if you care about level times in your price range.

^

(I use a raptor 74 in my computer, but doing it all again i'd go for the WD4000KD)

Even for your primary drive?

 

[BFG10K]

The Raptor will be better as RAID-0 does little/nothing for load times.

15K u320 owns all. The raptor was intended to bring the SCSI performance to a lower price point. If you have 300$, get a nice 15K drive, and Egg has several controller cards for ~100$.

Why would you want to do a silly thing like that when Raptor 150 is faster than many 15K SCSI drives for gaming load times?

 

[imported_importpsycho]

does it have to be 400gb?
caviar se16 is also available in cheaper 250gb version

 

[ribbon13]

Originally posted by: importpsycho
does it have to be 400gb?
caviar se16 is also available in cheaper 250gb version

Don't short change yourself too much friend. WD3200KS. Not as fast as the 400, but it's cheap and faster than the WD2500KS.

 

[imported_importpsycho]

got se16 250gb instead...
huge improvement over my old seagate 160gb 2mb ide
BF2 load at least twice faster, either that or new patch improved it...
anyway, after seeing this much improvement from single HD.. i'm so temped to go raptor lol