RAID-0 + Short Stroke - have my cake and eat it too?

[The Sauce]

I have been reading a lot lately about getting better performance by creating a smaller boot partition (i.e. short stroking) that reads off the outer edge of the drive. I have two Spinpoint F3's on the way for a RAID-0 setup. Would performance be even better if I combine the drives in RAID-0 AND create a smallish (~150GB) boot partition? Has anyone done this? Anyone seen any performance data?

 

[Elixer]

IMO, it isn't worth the effort. We are talking about a very small difference in speed.
You can blink and miss it.

 

[HendrixFan]

If you are sacrificing size for speed just do it right and get a SSD drive.

 

[faxon]

the secret to what you're trying to do is to only fill the single outer most tracks, so that the drive read write heads dont have to more more than a micron or 2. in order to get the capacity you need to install a modern OS you need tons of drives, and you need to know how many sectors are on each track so you dont format to many of them. an SSD is a far more effective idea, especially on a price/performance and $/gb basis

 

[WhoBeDaPlaya]

Careful on your Google search terms. Awhile back, it pulled up a guide on having sex with your car 😵

 

[Blain]

Careful on your Google search terms.

WOT can help in the filtering of quality search results

 

[The Sauce]

If you are sacrificing size for speed just do it right and get a SSD drive.

You are not sacrificing size. You just set 2 partitions, apparently. Then you have a smaller partition for your OS and the rest of it is a large partition for storage of other things... But you guys are probably right. I'm sure it's not worth it but on the other hand I have these drives coming anyway, why not try it?

 

[Voo]

You are not sacrificing size. You just set 2 partitions, apparently.

That's not what short-stroking usually refers to. Because well.. that happens already (OS and filesystem are usually on the outer sectors of the drive if you don't mess with it)

 

[The Sauce]

That's not what short-stroking usually refers to. Because well.. that happens already (OS and filesystem are usually on the outer sectors of the drive if you don't mess with it)

What about the swap file? Thought that got put somewhere on the inside of the disk.

 

[HendrixFan]

If you partition the remainder of the space on the drives as a different logical drive you take a huge hit if both are being used at the same time. If you put your swapfile there it will constantly run that part of the disk and slow down your short stroked section.