Striping SATA Drives - Doable?

[Tehtsuo]

I have two very mismatched SATA drives - One is a 300gb, the other is a 200gb. I have another 500gb that I use for data storage, so I'd be very happy to forfeit one of the two drives to up my performance. Would striping these be feasible, and would it provide any benefit?

[Enndo]

There are many articles all over the net discussing that as far as gaming goes. Alot of people claim better performance. However, the math has been done. It does not increase your gaming performance.

Edit- If you wanna improve performance I'd say have your operating system on one HDD and your WoW folder on one of the others.

[Tehtsuo]

Actually, I tried that. I get slightly decreased performance with WoW on the other drive. I believe the problem is the other drive has a smaller cache though. I might try juggling things around when I switch from the Windows 7 Beta to the Release Candidate - I need to get that done soon before it starts dying on me in August.

Anyone tested out the Release Candidate versus the Beta yet? Better, worse, about the same?

[Powerwar]

If you have a good RAID card or controller, then try this:

1 ) 300 GB Hd + 200 GB HD stripped in RAID 0 to make a total of a 500 GB RAID 0
2 ) 500 GB HD + 500 RAID 0 mirrored into a RAID 1

You may end with 500 GB only, but the overall reading performance should increase. In most cases this depends on the raid controller because there is lots of raiding in the mix.

[Enndo]

That could mean the HDD has less cache and/or the HDD might be a 5400rpm drive (cringe). Right now you can get Western Digital 1 terabyte drives with 32mb cache and 7200rpm for 99.99 from tigerdirect. I think you can get a 500gig 32mb cahce 7200rpm western digital for like 50 bucks lol.

[Tehtsuo]

Yeah, I even saw a 500g 7200rpm with 32mb cache at walmart today. Don't think I'd buy there either way though.

[Enndo]

When it comes to HDD's im a huge fan of western digital, ive used other brands and only ended up losing data a few months later lol. Western digital have been really reliable for me and fast enough that im not even gonna bother with a raptor.

[aboron]

If you have a good RAID card or controller, then try this:

1 ) 300 GB Hd + 200 GB HD stripped in RAID 0 to make a total of a 500 GB RAID 0
2 ) 500 GB HD + 500 RAID 0 mirrored into a RAID 1

You may end with 500 GB only, but the overall reading performance should increase. In most cases this depends on the raid controller because there is lots of raiding in the mix.

If you raid 0 a 300G with a 200G, you can only stripe 200G of the 300G drive, and 100G would go unused in the raid set (but could still be partitioned separately, unraided)

[Starbuck_Jones]

300gig and 200 gig will stripe into a raid 0 of 400gig in size. You will have 100gig left over on the other drive. However this is not always supported by your raid controller. All the hardware raid controlers like LSI and Adaptec I know will do this. Driver based raid controlers that most people have built into their motherboards are very hit and miss if they will raid unlike size and speed drives or let you access unused space on a larger drive.

As for performance, You will see an increase performance with read and writes. But you need to assess if thats where your bottleneck truely is. For WoW. Its universaly Ram then CPU then GPU before hard drives become a real factor with wow.

[Tehtsuo]

Well, that brings up a good point. I can't figure out what my bottleneck is right now. I get decent performance and I can actually run 5 pretty well (20fps) as long as I keep my graphical settings at bare minimum and run only the 2 or 3 addons I need. This is, of course, dependent on realizing that stepping foot in Dalaran is a death sentence. When I'm raiding solo with my paladin, I notice that my system just gets slaughtered in 25 mans when dps goes all out on a boss. The jumbled mess of spell effects that show up on a boss under heavy attack by a balanced raid is just too much for my system, and I drop down to 5-7 fps as a result. The sad part is, I get the same thing if I drop down my video settings to 1024x768 (EWW) so I don't think my graphics card is the problem.

Here's a link to my computer as I bought it - http://reviews.cnet.com/desktops/hp-pavilion-a6200n-athlon/4505-3118_7-32609453.html

Since buying it, I've swapped out the power supply for a 1k watt BFG, installed a 8800GTS, and replaced the memory with four 2m sticks of PC2-6400. I'm confused as to where the bottleneck is at this point, although its starting to feel like the answer is "You bought it from Best Buy, stupid!" Anyone have some input on what the problem would be? I'm happy with the performance I'm getting while multiboxing, but feel that it should be capable of keeping up a lot better than it is in raids.

[Enndo]

Your setup isn't bad. I do see your bottleneck. The cpu. Go to newegg and drop $89 on one of the amd quad cores youll be very happy with it.

[Enndo]

Check this chip out

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103244

It will solve your problem.



Edit- Nearly forgot, make sure you have a 64bit OS or else your only using 3 gigs of your ram! Windows 7 beta 64 bit is available for free for 1 year, download off microsoft website.

[Tehtsuo]

Yeah, I'm on the 64 bit beta right now, have the 64 bit RC waiting for me to switch over. I'd love to switch over to an AMD quad core, but according to the spec sheet my mobo won't handle it. I'll need to get a mobo as well. Any suggestions?

[Enndo]

You can get amd quad core and mobo combos really cheap off newegg.

[Tehtsuo]

I'll look into that. The combos don't seem to be priced terribly bad right now.

[Enndo]

This should work with that chip

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128387

So for less than 200 you can get a very fast pc.

[Tehtsuo]

Well, I'd prefer to do a clean swap rather than build a new computer - That mobo would require I also buy new memory, which moves it from the "Swap out a part or two" category into the "Build a new computer" category. I'm trying to keep the two separate - a ground up new system is in the future, I just want to limp this one along a little bit more.

[Enndo]

Well if you wanna go that route get an AMD 6000 duel core, it will fit your current mobo and is the fastest duel core amd has ever made.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103773

[Tehtsuo]

The spec sheet for that system says the max it can handle is a 5600. Is that an actual upper limit, or just because that's the highest that it was tested with?

[Enndo]

Not sure, it is a premade machine which means they did probly use a garbage generic mobo.

[Tehtsuo]

Not sure, it is a premade machine which means they did probly use a garbage generic mobo.Motherboard description Motherboard manufacturer's name: ECS MCP61PM-HM HP/Compaq name: Nettle2-GL8E CPU/Processor Socket: AM2 Supports the following processors: Athlon 64 X2 with Dual Core technology up to 5600+ (up to 89 watt) Athlon 64 less than 4000+ Sempron less than 3800+ Front-side bus (FSB) 2000MT/s (2.0 GT/s)

That's why I'm considering going with a combo mobo and AMD 6000 Dual core, if the price is right. That way I can just move all the other parts over as-is.

[Enndo]

Yeah they used a garbage mobo.

[Starbuck_Jones]

OEM/premade box will say that cpu is unsupported because the company never bundled that cpu with the system. Chances are it will work, but it might not as well... On post the bios has a list of supported cpus in it. It may do nothing, it may yell at you and say its unsupported and still work after a post message, or it wont post at all with the unsupported cpu.

Do some google searching and see if anyone with the same box has put that cpu in it and what problems they have. i have an unusported cpu in my XPS720 from dell. It posts and boots just fine but I get a warning message on post about an unsuported cpu.

[Tehtsuo]

So I'm looking at the hardware Enndoh linked:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128387 ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128387')
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103244 ('http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819103244')

It actually looks like that motherboard will take pc 800 memory per the specs on Gigabyte's site:

"Support for DDR2 1333(O.C.)/1066/800 MHz memory modules"

This seems to be a good choice for me, I can swap all my components from my current system onto that motherboard. Any opinions?