Seperate drive for the OS?

[Dropmachine]

So, I ahve been thinking about using a seperate drive for the OS.

I am building a new machine, and want it done right. Its a pretty decent toy for sure, but i want to make sure its fast.

SO, i have two options.

Run a 74gig Raptor drive for the OS and 2 or 3 critical programs.

Run a Western Digital 500 gig SATAII 5000aaks drive, which seems to be similar speed. Install OS and programs there, games on a seperate drive.


Will I notice a speed increase doing this? Is there a point?

Thanks in advance.

 

[Hauk]

Raptors, esp the 16mb versions, provide faster boot and load times than 7200rpm SATA II drives, but you'd need to be paying attention to notice.

If you're looking for the best return on investment, don't overthink the hard drives. A modern SATA 7200 8mb+ buffer hard drive is adequate. CPU, graphics card, and a stable mobo is where you want to focus your cash. Memory that can keep up with a cpu overclock is important, which can be accomplished with decent budget ram...

 

[Dropmachine]

The CPU is a 6600, the board a p5n32-e SLi, the Ram is 2x2gb muskin DDR800 something or other, and a GTX 8800 OC2.

What I want is killer photoshop performance without having to go RAID, and a few other programs to fly.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

I have a 74gb Raptor just for boot & programs, RAID 0 for scratch & games, and RAID 5 for storage. IMHO, there is no reason to seperate installed programs & the OS, as any programs have to be reinstalled when the OS dies. I like keeping the OS seperate in case it does go belly up, I can reformat it without having to worry about what other data I'm losing--I just backup my favorites / bookmarks, Outlook data, and save games.

 

[Dropmachine]

Yeah I plan on doing the same thing really. I just want the OS and photoshop to fly, hence why I am considering the seperate drive.

 

[LOUISSSSS]

i'd use the raptor for your entire OS and all of your programs. and a seperate storage drive for all your files/media backup

 

[heyheybooboo]

My $.02

You're gonna waste alot of that Raptor if all you have on it is your OS/apps. Find a 40-60gb IDE drive for your OS/apps. Run 3 SATAs as your scratch disks and data drives. Move your paging file onto one of the SATAs. Load up on fast RAM in the rig - that is where your apps will work from anyway - not from the OS/app drive.

If your are going to use WinV use the Superfetch thumbdrive trick for part of your paging file.

Edit: Can't type fer sheet this pm

 

[Dropmachine]

I have reasonably fast ram I beleive, its :

Mushkin HP2-6400 DDR2-800 2x2GB High Performance Series CAS 5-4-4-12 (996564 (2x2048MB))

How can an IDE drive be as fast as a SATA2? I don't understand how the OS woulnd't be slower.

So is the raptor drive for the OS and Photoshop a bad idea? Should I just get a second WD5000AAKS?

 

[heyheybooboo]

I wish I had some links handy but here goes . . .

Using the raptor for your OS/apps is fine. My point is you will be wasting a substantial portion of the drive capacity and gaining little if any performance increase. I think your largest performance gains would come from spreading the system/apps load across as many smaller hard disks as you can configure.

Once you launch PS performance is highly dependent upon your ram and virtual memory. IF you left your paging file on the OS/apps drive then YES I would use the raptor for your OS/apps. BUT to discourage 'disk-thrashing' in memory-intensive applications it is most important to place your paging file on a hard drive separate from your OS/apps. You can even split the page file between two hard drives separate from your OS/apps drive to increase performance. And in the case of WinV paging file performance may be increased by designating a usb2 thumb drive to handle a portion of your virtual memory.

The idea behind all this is to control, optimize and disperse hard drive I/O read/writes for max performance. As opposed to 2 drives handling paging files, data, scratch disks and OS/apps your gains in performance will be found spreading the *hits* across 4 250gb drives (as opposed to 2 500gb drives).

Now it's gonna get ugly Initially 32 bit XP (and Vista I think) are going to wack that 4gb of ram to 2gb that Windows 'allocates' to user mode programs. The other 2gb will be allocated to the Win kernel. In xpPro (maybe xphome - not sure about WinV) you may edit the boot.ini file with what is called the * 3/gb 'switch' *. This will allocate up to 3gb to user mode programs.

In the PS *Prefs* you may then optimize the amount of user mode memory that you wish to commit to PS. Off the top of my head I think the sweet spot is around 70%.

And unless you plan to be gaming while PS'ing moving those programs off the OS/apps drive probably won't show a performance gain (unless the game apps drive HD avaialble capacity way beyond 50%).

I hope this made sense :0

 

[heyheybooboo]

unless the game apps drive HD avaialble capacity way beyond 50%

That guy meant to say unless the game apps drive HD avaialble capacity way below 50%

 

[Slugbait]

OK, so I'm in a similar situation. I have a SATA Raptor, for which I will partition about 12G for XP, core system files, etc. The other partition would be for drive images, apps, games, etc (a seperate IDE 250G drive for data)

...would it be best to move the page file to the second partition, or the second drive?

 

[Dropmachine]

So, if I ran :

36 GB Raptor for OS, and photoshop
2x 500gig SATAII for other programs, scratch disk and storage
1x 200gig SATA (already hae it) just to backup folders and another scratch disk

Basically i'd be rockin a fast as hell machine, OS and Photoshop wise?

 

[Ruger22C]

Second drive..

 

[Dropmachine]

?

 

[heyheybooboo]

Originally posted by: Slugbait
OK, so I'm in a similar situation. I have a SATA Raptor, for which I will partition about 12G for XP, core system files, etc. The other partition would be for drive images, apps, games, etc (a seperate IDE 250G drive for data)

...would it be best to move the page file to the second partition, or the second drive?

Sorry. What Ruger said. The partition being on the same drive will not help. Movin' the paging file to the second drive is the way to go ..

@ Dropmachine: Yeah, man. You're gettin' there! If yah got 6 sata ports on your mobo I'd go 4x250 instead of 2x500 - and putting your other programs off the 36gb raptor won't get yah much - unless yah gots more than 20 gb of programs

 

[Dropmachine]

Oh, I got a lot more then 20 gb of programs, thats for sure. Its kinda gross ow many things I am going to be running. Embarrasing really.

TOmorrow I go get my Drives. ANy reason to get another 500gb drive over the Raptor? Aren't the new WD drives just as fast at pulling info on and off?

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Dropmachine
Oh, I got a lot more then 20 gb of programs, thats for sure. Its kinda gross ow many things I am going to be running. Embarrasing really.

TOmorrow I go get my Drives. ANy reason to get another 500gb drive over the Raptor? Aren't the new WD drives just as fast at pulling info on and off?

w/ the raptor what you are paying for and gainng is a faster seek times, so if your machine has to go through a lot of files, it will be able to find them faster than a 7.2k hdd, same w/ using programs, they will be loaded into ram faster. so the difference is not in str but in seek times. having fast seek times and fast str is excellent

overall, i have noticed a improvement when comparing 10K and 15K hdds to 7.2K hdd (i prefer scsi but that is me and actually the raptor is a good drive for the perfomance and price). i have been running 10-15K hdds for years, so this is not a "just found out trend"

whether or not the performance boost is worth it is strictly up to the individual. my machines will always have at least 2 drives, and they will always be 10K or faster (until decent priced ssds come out ) and my smaller drive will have os/app and games on it, while the 2nd will have data and the pagefile on it, and possibly another for another pagefile and misc.

if it were me, i would go the raptor, 16MB version along w/ the others and don't forget to defrag often.

i would be careful w/ older drives are they were definately slower in many areas compared to the drives of today, even at the same rpm, like the old 40GB 7.2k hdds due to platter density - they have crap for str and usually not too good for seek, so if you use those old drives them make them the last line for scratch in ps.