What's faster? (hard drives)

Jarth

So I currently have 2 120g IDE drives, a 200g sata drive (just got it, not used yet) and found an old 80g in my closet which still works perfectly. I'm thinking of reinstalling XP and doing some crap-removal in the process, and was wondering if it would be better to install XP on say the 80g IDE and use the 200g sata for big games, or put XP and games both on the sata? On top of that, which drive would it be better to put the XP pagefile on?

It's also an option to take my 80g IDE to work and swap it out for an 80g sata (since we have a ton and use both equally). I'm also thinking about RAIDing the 120g drives for a bit more speed.

What's the ideal configuration here? Is any of this really worth it or is the speed difference marginal and I'm just wasting time?

PirateJon

Splitting the OS and the and the applications onto two different spindles would increase performance, depending on the controller setup.

Raid 0 will increase performance at the cost of reliability, raid 1 has no effect on performance.

The motherboard controllers, disk cache and spindle speeds you don't mention also have a large effect on throughput.


Best performance guess: Raid 0 the OS/page file and put the apps on the sata drive. Even then I'd be somewhat suprised if you could tell the difference without benchmarks.

Jarth

All drives are 7200rpm, the IDEs are Seagate Ultra ATA/100s, the SATAs are Western Digital Caviars at 3Gb/s.

PirateJon wrote: »

Best performance guess: Raid 0 the OS/page file and put the apps on the sata drive. Even then I'd be somewhat suprised if you could tell the difference without benchmarks.

Blah, that's what I figured. Oh well, thanks anyway

vonPoonBurGer

PirateJon wrote:

raid 1 has no effect on performance

Actually, RAID-1 does have an impact on performance. With writes, there is a slight performance penalty. The extent of the performance penalty depends on the RAID controller in use, but it's usually minimal. This is more than offset by a potentially huge performance benefit to reads. Most modern RAID controllers will split read requests separately between the two drives. As a result you can get pretty close to 2x read performance from a RAID-1 mirror set if you've got a decent RAID controller, and your OS supports multithreaded reads.