I'll be upgrading my PC soon to either dual or quad core. That worries me because my disks are currently a huge bottleneck. How can that be resolved, and I'm talking here about theory, not "get a faster drive".
Typical situation: simultaneously downloading binaries at 10Mbps, QuickPar scanning and recovering, Winrar extracting, MP3s playing, E-mail polling, Web browsing, file printing, etc. Also, DV input, TV capture, transcoding, and burning.
I have 2 120GB drives on the same channel with two optical drives on the other. One is partitioned OS & data so it doesn't fragment as badly. I try to download or capture to one disk and then extract or encode to the other as much as possible to avoid thrashing, but there are some operations (like QuickPar scanning and repairing) that just can't be split across spindles. I defrag often, including space consolidation.
I'm envisioning JBOD NCQ SATA drives, 2 or 3 and probably one dedicated to OS so I can dedicate each spindle to one task at a time. I'd go with Raptor for the speed except that I need bigger capacity so will likely go with 400-500GB drives. I'm not envisioning RAID of any kind because I'm not interested in fault tolerance at all and am mostly concerned with throughput. The RAID levels that don't waste a lot of disk space tend to worsen write times in favor of improved read access.
Am I doing everything I can to optimize my disk I/O or am I missing something? Are there any performance monitor stats that I should be focusing on with the associated registry tweaks or is that like trying to swat a buzzard with a fly swatter?
Frogger in FL
Dell 1.6GHz P4, 512MB WinXP SP2
Disk 0 - WD 1200JB C😀ata E:bootOS
Disk 1 - Maxtor 6Y120P0 F😀ata
(Not looking to increase current system performance, more for planning next one.)
Typical situation: simultaneously downloading binaries at 10Mbps, QuickPar scanning and recovering, Winrar extracting, MP3s playing, E-mail polling, Web browsing, file printing, etc. Also, DV input, TV capture, transcoding, and burning.
I have 2 120GB drives on the same channel with two optical drives on the other. One is partitioned OS & data so it doesn't fragment as badly. I try to download or capture to one disk and then extract or encode to the other as much as possible to avoid thrashing, but there are some operations (like QuickPar scanning and repairing) that just can't be split across spindles. I defrag often, including space consolidation.
I'm envisioning JBOD NCQ SATA drives, 2 or 3 and probably one dedicated to OS so I can dedicate each spindle to one task at a time. I'd go with Raptor for the speed except that I need bigger capacity so will likely go with 400-500GB drives. I'm not envisioning RAID of any kind because I'm not interested in fault tolerance at all and am mostly concerned with throughput. The RAID levels that don't waste a lot of disk space tend to worsen write times in favor of improved read access.
Am I doing everything I can to optimize my disk I/O or am I missing something? Are there any performance monitor stats that I should be focusing on with the associated registry tweaks or is that like trying to swat a buzzard with a fly swatter?
Frogger in FL
Dell 1.6GHz P4, 512MB WinXP SP2
Disk 0 - WD 1200JB C😀ata E:bootOS
Disk 1 - Maxtor 6Y120P0 F😀ata
(Not looking to increase current system performance, more for planning next one.)
