Gameing Hard Drive *Help please*

[mayro]

Im currently running :

Pentium 4 2.4c (not over clocked)

1024 of pc 400mhz ram

Asus p4p800 deluxe

Powercolor Radeon 9800 pro 128meg

Sound blaster live.

And this brings me to the thing im considering upgradeing...

I keep hearing that these 37 gig raptor drives are just awsome when used in raid 0. I belive raid 0 just means half the file goes on hard drive one and half the hard drive goes on rappy number 2.

Im currently useing a 128gig Segate beracuda by itself.
(Serial ATA connected but not in any raid)

Should i buy another segate and raid 0 the 2 128's OR
Get 2x "coolest fastests gameing hard drives" and raid 0 those?

 

[blackeye]

Raid zero has no noticable effect on game load performance or FPS.

 

[mayro]

So it isnt worth it to get another Segate and run raid? or the 10krpm raptors?

 

[Cyanide]

Hard drives do not matter much at all in terms of game performance. If you absolutely need to shave 1-5 seconds off your load times, then you might consider moving to raid 0 with 10,000 rpm drives. But if you have any sense, you won't bother with that.

Games, like all programs, run from RAM not the hard drive. RAM is your computer's "work space". Everything your computer needs to work on goes from the hard drive or CD-rom or whatever, to the RAM, then to the CPU. When you start the game, it loads all the important stuff into ram so that it can be accessed very quickly, hundreds of times faster than any HD can access it. This is why games have minimum RAM requirements and why having more ram makes things faster (less time spent moving stuff from the HD to the RAM).

 

[mayro]

So, if i where wanting more hard drive space and a little bit of a extra boost, it would be best to just get a duplicate of the hard drive that i already have and raid 0 it or just let them be hard drive 1 and 2?

Thank you- You saved me 300 bucks! hehe

This is the Segate im useing:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-148-017&depa=1

This is the Raptor if i was going to get it:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-144-160&depa=1
(for people wanting it it has a 25 doller rebate on one or 50 on 2)

 

[blackeye]

Raptors will make your system seem incredibly fast though. Your os will boot much faster and so will your games. It wont have any ingame performance though.
Raid 0 will actually take longer for your computer to boot up because your bios will spend longer time searching for the hard drive.
Raptors are not really worth the price vs performance you get out of them. They are excellent hard drives though and most gamers have them because the extra couple seconds a level loads in can be crucial. I know on my laptop when in playing some games because it only has a 5400rpm drive I am usaully the last person to load and then I get spawn killed which is very annoying.

 

[Gunsnroses]

Actualy, I can tell a huge loading difference in Battlefield, and windows.

Not to noticable in any other game though.

I have to western digitals, 80 gig 7200rpm, 8mb buffer. SATA in raid 0.

 

[Cyanide]

Well, if you wanted a little boost in install times and load times and/or you don't like having multiple drives (logical drives. As in, you have 2 physical hard drives, but it appears as though you only have 1) then raid 0 is the way to go. If you don't mind multiple drives and won't miss 1 or 2 seconds of lost time waiting for installs, then don't bother with Raid 0.

I've noticed that you often lose some HD space when using raid because of cluster size issues and other convoluted things that I don't want to explain . Also, raid drivers have been known to cause problems with some software and they never seem to get fixed because the problems are so obscure because the vast majority of people don't use raid. So if you get one of those problems, you're pretty much SOL.

Honestly, unless you're running a file server, the only reason to have raid 0 is to be able to say "my computer has raid 0", so that computer illiterate people will think you know a lot about computers.

 

[Gunsnroses]

I dunno with raid, I can xfer crap alot faster, Its nice being able to back a hard drive up at a reasonable speed.

 

[[Matt]]

take note that raptor drives also come in 74Gb flavour.... I have one

 

[psyno]

The newer, 74 GB ones are actually faster and quieter too...

 

[mayro]

I Emailed Seagate....

They told me that i could get a increse of 0% to 15%... but closer to the 0%...

They told me if i wanted it to go faster to get SCSI.

 

[Dead-Inside]

Really, you won't have any difference on performance unless you have a really slow/old HD. I got a 5400 RPM Western Digital Caviar 40 GB, which is extremly old, however, I've never had a single problem, it runs quietly, and it keeps up without a blink.

So trust me, getting a super-mega-HD only adds noice unless you plan on copying around a load of files on your HD.