Now what should I do?

[Lemodular]

I've been running my system with a IDE Seagate (160g) as my primary with a IDE WD (100g) as a secondary. I just got my hands on a pair of SATA seagates (120's). would like to put these giuys in a RAID - 0 (?) for speed. Should/COuld I transfer all my stuff from my IDE Prime onto the SATA's and make it my primary (and boot) drive(s)? Then keep the IDE drives as secondaries. To do this, how would I make my bios (Abit AG8) detect and boot from the SATA?

Note, I have already set the SATA controller on the BIOS to "Enhance" and all the drives are present in windows.

The reason I'm doing this is to hopefully decrease the time when I'm burning, ripping or encoding/decoding large files.

 

[ohnnyj]

Sounds like a good plan although the speed increase won't be HUGE it may be noticable. You may want to reinstall XP on the new RAID array, format your current boot drive (backing up first) and continue to use the IDEs as data storage as you suggested. An alternative is to use a program such as Ghost to copy your entire drive over. I'm not sure how well the tranfer is peformed and is one of the reasons I like to do a clean install with a switch such as this. I wouldn't be comfortable with my rig otherwise, but that's just me.

 

[bob4432]

you will get additional performance for what you are wanting. burning is going to be limited to the optical drive, ripping is going to be limited to the optical drive and encoding/decoding will be cpu limited.

just add the drives on the sata controller and use them for additional storage.

 

[LED]

If you are doing a lot of encoding and can afford it then I would consider just building a separate Rig dedicated to doing that as it can be quite stressful on a single rig while multitasking/doing other things

 

[Lemodular]

thanks for your replies so far, I thought a RAID-0 may help because of my habit for multi-tasking. from a previous post, it was suggested that a RAID setup may help me with my bottle neck. Disk read/write seems to be the pinch here.

 

[bob4432]

in the other post you have mentioned, it states that the cpu is idle 90%+, what cpu is it? what software are you using? when i think of multitask and encoding i would think that the cpu should be at or around 90% 90% of the time.

when you are doing all of this, especially the encoding you should be using more cpu.

in my experience, the cpu was always the bottleneck for this but in your case it sounds that it may not be the issue. are all drives in in dma mode and not pio mode?

this quickpar program, i have read the site about it so i am assuming it is heavy i/o intensive but also heavy cpu intensive. is it like a md5 file checker?

 

[Lemodular]

Originally posted by: bob4432
in the other post you have mentioned, it states that the cpu is idle 90%+, what cpu is it? what software are you using? when i think of multitask and encoding i would think that the cpu should be at or around 90% 90% of the time.

when you are doing all of this, especially the encoding you should be using more cpu.

in my experience, the cpu was always the bottleneck for this but in your case it sounds that it may not be the issue. are all drives in in dma mode and not pio mode?

this quickpar program, i have read the site about it so i am assuming it is heavy i/o intensive but also heavy cpu intensive. is it like a md5 file checker?

it's a 3.0 precott. Yeah I am as supprised as you to see that the stuff i'm doing is not stressing the cpu out. I rarely break 1g in ram usage All drives a in Ultra DMA mode 5.
QuickaPar is more than md5, in short, it can rebuild and restore broken or missing multi part files. Other patchable "par" file must be present. You can read about it here

anyone have a similar setup?

 

[bob4432]

my setup is a 2.8c/1GB pc3200/u320scsi 36GB 10krpm system drive/60GB & 80GB ata100 hdds/1 dvd-rom/1 dvd-rw/9800pro running xp pro.

i have not used the quickpar program, but i wonder what is causing your system to not utilize the cpu. just a couple of days ago i was ripping with dvd-decrypter with the dvd-rom, burning a dvd with the dvd-rw and encoding a dvd with dvd-rebuilder and the cinema craft encoder(excellent quality) and also surfing the internet. my cpu was 95% for about 3hrs while the encoding went on, but my ram never went over 1GB. i have put the source/destination files for the encoding on all different channels (either both hdds on the same channel, one hdd with one optical drive or put stuff on or taken off the scsi drive) with no difference in speed, that is why i didn't/don't think that the striping raid would help you out, but i am still wondering why your cpu utilization is not up higher. with the par program, are the files small? how many files does this par program check? is it in the thousands?

i saw this on the quickpar site - "The Default Priority setting determines how QuickPar cooperates with other applications running on your computer. If your computer has a single CPU, then it is probably best to set this to Idle, but if you have a dual CPU computer set it to Normal." since you are running a prescott, do you have it set to normal since the os thinks there are 2 processors because of ht?