Best upgrade with current specs?

[suicidesspyder]

Ok new thing what is the best external hdd for a laptop so maybe i can run main from laptop hdd and 4 from external just thinking. I run a duo core 2.5 ghz 2 cpu and am upgrading from 4gb to 8gb mem atm. Ideas ideas ideas let me know the king of procrastination is me.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Yep, I've done various ways of running WoW, including RAID0 300GB Velociraptors, RAID0 36GB Raptors, RAID0 320GB 7200rpm, and an SSD. The key is the access time. An SSD can locate a file in 0.1-0.3ms, while the fastest Velociraptor is around 4.10ms. That's a huge difference when you're trying to locate hundreds of files on a drive. Just think of every piece of gear on every player in your local area when you visit a battleground or Dalaran - every piece of gear has textures and animations that have to be loaded. When you enter an area with 200 players, and each player has roughly 50 textures to load.. that's a sudden request for 10,000 files from your hard drive. These data files needed to be transferred aren't very large (evidenced by the comparatively ugly and pixellated textures), so the transfer rate doesn't matter at all as much as the access (seek) time.

My next step will be hosting WoW from Acard's ram drive with 16-32GB of memory.. which supports RAID0 from one Acard box. I'm positive this will be faster than any hard drive option short of a true main memory ram drive, but I don't want to take 12GB of space away from system memory to dedicate towards WoW, nor do I want to have to rebuild the ram drive after every reboot. Acard's unit has a battery backup - system ram drives don't.

That thing about textures makes a lot of sense, maybe access time is critical. If transfer rate is not important why not get the cheaper ($245 vs 379) acard, both are sata 3.0 and the smallers could be set to 2X6 (12G which should be enough for wow), for about $150 of ram. Just can't raid it (but raid only effect transfer rate and not acess time).

Still when we start talking around $400 - $600 seems that waiting for a stable 24G I7 motherboard is the best bet ....

[-silencer-]

That thing about textures makes a lot of sense, maybe access time is critical. If transfer rate is not important why not get the cheaper ($245 vs 379) acard, both are sata 3.0 and the smallers could be set to 2X6 (12G which should be enough for wow), for about $150 of ram. Just can't raid it (but raid only effect transfer rate and not acess time).

Still when we start talking around $400 - $600 seems that waiting for a stable 24G I7 motherboard is the best bet ....

Possibly, but because I use my machine for heavy processing far beyond WoW, when X58 24GB BIOS is stable on the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme, I'm going to use all 24GB without wanting WoW on half of it.. thus, the Acard will be the best solution. For anyone who just wants WoW performance, I agree with you.. although I have a feeling that 6x4GB DDR3 sticks may be more expensive than 6x2GB DDR3 + Acard + 8x2GB DDR2.

Currently, 6x4GB DDR3 = $1800.

6x2GB DDR3 = $420
Acard = $380
8x2GB DDR2 = $200

Nearly half the price for 12GB memory and Acard with 16GB... and it's available NOW without BIOS issues.

[Sam DeathWalker]

As ususal all so true. Seems everyone getting higher end stuffs has other uses for it lol ...

This thread is showing way worse performance then what the acard company publish:

ACard ANS-9010 RAM Drive

Well I figure that by the time the rampage board is stable (my choice of board also) 4G ram will cost 1/2 the price.

[-silencer-]

ACard ANS-9010 RAM Drive[/url]

Well I figure that by the time the rampage board is stable (my choice of board also) 4G ram will cost 1/2 the price.

Yep, and there's nothing wrong with buying this:
3ware 9650SE - hardware RAID controller with 8 SATA 3.0 ports. $520
2x Acard ANS-9010 boxes. $760
16x2GB DDR2 sticks. $400
= $1680 for RAID0 across 4 8GB virtual drives.. that's 32GB of space with 4x SATA 3.0 bandwidth and little RAID overhead on the CPU since you're using a true hardware RAID controller.
This is where the Acard becomes the best solution.. since no consumer system is close to being albe to run 32GB of memory for a true system ram drive at this price. Technically, this could be done without the $520 controller... the ICH10R on the Asus Rampage 2 Extreme can handle 4x drive RAID0 array, but it only leaves 2 SATA ports for other hard drives or optical drives..

Plus, the RAID controller will be able to handle two more Acard boxes for future expansion..

[Sam DeathWalker]

So you figure the horrid Raid0 test results for the acard

http://techreport.com/articles.x/16255/9

Is due to the junk onboard raid controler?:


coded the bars by manufacturer. The ANS-9010 appears in bright red, and we've tested it in single-drive and RAID 0 configs. In RAID mode, we relied on the RAID feature built into our test system's Intel south bridge.

All tests were run three times, and their results were averaged, using the following test system.


Processor Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.4GHz
System bus 800MHz (200MHz quad-pumped)
Motherboard Asus P5WD2 Premium
Bios revision 0422
North bridge Intel 955X MCH
South bridge Intel ICH7R
Chipset drivers Chipset 7.2.1.1003
AHCI/RAID 5.1.0.1022

[-silencer-]

Sam, might want to try testing with ICH10R. A family member is a microprocessor engineer for Intel's chipsets (I'm not sure which they are working on now or have in the past), but there have been both performance and featureset improvements with each generation of southbridge. I'm sure there's a significant difference between ICH7R and ICH10R for RAID0 performance.. I wish I could find the link, but there was a review when the ICH9R came out and the improvement numbers were impressive.