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-...-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.