I've installed windows 7 on a spare WD raptor drive, but narf, im not noticing it being as superduper fast as i thought it might be.
So, to speed things up, i am thinking of setting up:
1 x New, fast HDD - windows boot
2 x existing raptors in raid0 - games, apps etc
1 x existing storage drive - docs, misc file storage
I doubt windows itself needs a huge drive, so an SSD is on the cards. However, i cant see a particularly stand out model, and they are all expensive. Does anyone have any decent SSD reccomendations? Alternatively - a new velociraptor? or a short-stroked 1tb? or what?
Ideas & suggestions welcome!
PS. Not found anything that Windows XP couldn't do yet
All my existing Raptors, excepting the newest 300G one - which I think was the 3rd generation and first to be called Velociraptor - are now pretty much matched for general usage by off-the-shelf 7,200 1TB drives at a tiny fraction of the cost/MB. It's only their low seek time that justifies their high price, which comes to light when doing random access operations, rather than the raw data throughput of sequential operations.
Windows start-up, video streaming/encoding and app/game startup are all sequential operations. Random operations are using applications, swap file access and level-loading in games.
Windows 7 (and Fista) have a thing called ReadyBoost, where you can designate a memory stick to be an index-holder for your hard-drive's data. While their speed is generally slow (25MB/s) - that's not important as the data transferred is small - but their seek time is blisteringly fast, which mitigates the relatively poor seek times of lower RPM drives.
If you're serious about boosting speed, I'd say the best places to put your fastest disks, in order from best, are a decidicated swap-file drive, your games drive and your OS drive.
RAID0 will give you about a 1.5x increase over the base disks, but is a risky proposition. You not only lose all data if only one drive fails, but are actually more likely to have a failure by implementing it. Depending on how often you backup and stuff, you may decide it's worth the risk - they are however ideal as dedicated swap file drives.
Solid state drives have seek times comparable to memory sticks but faster sequential rates, but are still a lot slower than conventional hard drives at shifting data. Their major selling-point is slient running, and low power/heat.
The "best" hard drives are 15k RPM SCSI, or SAS drives, which of course cost more than anything else and require their own architecture to fit.
Roughly, in acsending order of price:
A memory stick, Sequential 25MB/s, Random 0.1ms
A £30 1TB SATA drive, Sequential 100MB/s, Random 10ms
A high-end 1TB drive, Sequential 200MB/s, Random 6ms
A Velociraptor, Sequential 150MB/s, Random 3ms
An SSD, Sequential 60MB/s, Random 0.1ms
A SAS Drive, Sequential 500+GB/s, Random 1ms
ProfHawking wrote:PS. Not found anything that Windows XP couldn't do yet
You mean aside from Aero Peek, DirectX 10 & 11, upgrading GPU drivers without rebooting, and usable search that actually finds the stuff you're looking for?
ProfHawking wrote:Well, i dunno, i thought it was the "fastest os yet" or whatever.
I guess I haven't had use for any of its new features yet.
I think i'll get a velociraptor, rip out the old raptors and be done with it.
Actually, the Samsung Spinpoint F3 is faster than the Velociraptor in everything except access times and random read/writes. In pretty much ever real world scenario it's faster. It's also cheaper and a bit more than 3 times as big. Buying a Velociraptor is a waste of money at this point. If you need faster, get an SSD.
