i have a 4.8 dual cpu, 4 gb ram, 1 gb gpu and a maxtor diamondmax 10 160gb hard drive im thinking of changing my HD as i think it is slowing my system up i have been told the raptor drives are good any advice, would i notice any differance

Yes you probably would, with large data transfers especially. You could look at running two drives in a striping raid, you will get a 50% performance increase there as well (even better with rapters) BUT i will stress that by doing that you have increase your potential drive failure rate. Is the data critical?

 

Alternativly to that you can employ some redendancy and use 4 drives to have it striped and then mirrored. Im pressuming your machine can do this without the purchase of extra controllers... since it must have a good mainboard.

 

(This arrangement will use the PC to do the actual work within the raid array, but i wouldnt say you will notice the slow down! Especially with the performance increase)

 

Rapters spin at 10k, vs 7200rpm for most IDE/SATA Hard disks this is where the performance bonus comes from, but they do produce quite allot more noise!

Yes you probably would, with large data transfers especially. You could look at running two drives in a striping raid, you will get a 50% performance increase there as well (even better with rapters) BUT i will stress that by doing that you have increase your potential drive failure rate. Is the data critical?

 

Alternativly to that you can employ some redendancy and use 4 drives to have it striped and then mirrored. Im pressuming your machine can do this without the purchase of extra controllers... since it must have a good mainboard.

 

(This arrangement will use the PC to do the actual work within the raid array, but i wouldnt say you will notice the slow down! Especially with the performance increase)

 

Rapters spin at 10k, vs 7200rpm for most IDE/SATA Hard disks this is where the performance bonus comes from, but they do produce quite allot more noise!

data on my pc wouldn't be critical my mac has that, its for gaming and the net and dvd burning, would you reccomend having 2 drives or just the one. why would having 2 increase failure, my motherboard is asus a8n32-sli

well technically because there is two they are twice as likly to fail, but i have run striping raid arrays for 6 years or so and (touch wood) never had a drive fail on me

 

To be honest, you can tell if a drive is going to fail so its not so much of an issue. And drives dont fail as much as they used to these days. If its not critical data then just have the two drives, get them set up in a striping raid and you will be quite pleased with the results i think!

You have the next board up from me, yours has the two full 16x pci express ports (where as in mine the pci express ports end up as 8x when you use graphics card in SLI)

Have a look through the manual shoudl tell you how to do it

For gaming you could get 2 raptor drives in a RAID 0 configuration. As quavey said you will get a 50% increase in speed, the failure he's on about is that a bit of data for each file is stored on each drive so if one drive goes yuou loose all your data

is it just a case of installing the HD's and turning the raid option on my MOBO. what does raid do exactly, does it use both drives (as 1) or uses them to make two copies of what you put on you PC

is it just a case of installing the HD's and turning the raid option on my MOBO. what does raid do exactly, does it use both drives (as 1) or uses them to make two copies of what you put on you PC

 

RAID 0 = 2 or more drives made into one

RAID 1 = Data is stored on both drives

RAID 5 = Data is stored on all drives + parity digit

RAID 6 = RAID 5 but 2 parity digits

RAID 10 = RAID 0 + RAID 1

JABOD = Just A Bunch Of Discs

so why would i have more than one is it just for more space

Alternativly to that you can employ some redendancy and use 4 drives to have it striped and then mirrored. Im pressuming your machine can do this without the purchase of extra controllers... since it must have a good mainboard.

 

If he's after performance why would he stripe the drives only to then mirror the drives? Isn't that like putting your foot down but leaving your hand brake half on just in case? ;) If the datas critical, back it up. Leave the redundant arrays to file servers.

 

I've got a pair of the raptors in my rig and I run them in Raid0. They really are very quick. I've two identical game rigs however one has raptors in raid0 and the other has diamondmax10s in a raid0 config and the load time for maps on BF2142 is about 15 seconds difference. I'd stick another gig of ram in your PC though if your HD is slowing your rig down. You're probably running out of RAM and caching off to the HDs. I'd do this whether you move to raptors or not.

so why would i have more than one is it just for more space

 

 

You would have more than one for performance. On paper the motherboard can write to the individual SATA controllers simultaneously. Therefore if you have 2 HDs in a RAID0 stripe, half the data gets written to one drive and half the data gets written, simultaneously, to the other HD. Effectively halving the read/write times. Of course in practice it's not that efficient but it is a big improvement over a single HD.

my motherboard is asus a8n32-sli

 

If you do decide to go down the raid route with this board, don't install the nvidia storage controller driver when you install the nforce 4 chipset drivers. The nforce4 chipset with the nvidia storage controller driver is well documented for corrupting data on raid arrays. I've got the SE deluxe version of the same board in a couple of boxes and have used both drivers. The windows ones are great if not slightly slower. The nvidia ones? lol!

You would have more than one for performance. On paper the motherboard can write to the individual SATA controllers simultaneously. Therefore if you have 2 HDs in a RAID0 stripe, half the data gets written to one drive and half the data gets written, simultaneously, to the other HD. Effectively halving the read/write times. Of course in practice it's not that efficient but it is a big improvement over a single HD.

thanks that explains it

If he's after performance why would he stripe the drives only to then mirror the drives? Isn't that like putting your foot down but leaving your hand brake half on just in case? ;) If the datas critical, back it up. Leave the redundant arrays to file servers.

 

 

Doesnt make much difference... you still get the performance with the data security...