Need some advice about hard drive setup

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.giga-byte (More info?)

Hi.

I have the 8INXP board. (It has 2 IDE ports in the chipset, 2 IDE ports
using the Promise controller, and 2 SATA ports using the Silicon Image 3112
controller.) I have WinXP running from a 60GB drive (7200 rpm, 2MB cache)
connected to one of the chipset IDE ports. I just bought a 300GB drive (7200
rpm, 16MB cache) and it's connected to the SATA controller. My question is
this: would I get any noticeable performance increase if I booted my
computer from the SATA drive (using the F6 drivers)?

Basically, I'm wondering if the PCI bus limitation of the SATA controller
would negate the benefits of having a faster drive with a bigger cache.

I'm also wondering what kind of performance increase I could expect if I
bought another identical 300GB drive and striped those together on the SATA
controller and booted from the RAID array.

--
NoRemorse
"Expect me when you see me."

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.giga-byte (More info?)

NoRemorse wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I have the 8INXP board. (It has 2 IDE ports in the chipset, 2 IDE ports
> using the Promise controller, and 2 SATA ports using the Silicon Image 3112
> controller.) I have WinXP running from a 60GB drive (7200 rpm, 2MB cache)
> connected to one of the chipset IDE ports. I just bought a 300GB drive (7200
> rpm, 16MB cache) and it's connected to the SATA controller. My question is
> this: would I get any noticeable performance increase if I booted my
> computer from the SATA drive (using the F6 drivers)?
>
> Basically, I'm wondering if the PCI bus limitation of the SATA controller
> would negate the benefits of having a faster drive with a bigger cache.
>
> I'm also wondering what kind of performance increase I could expect if I
> bought another identical 300GB drive and striped those together on the SATA
> controller and booted from the RAID array.
>
Your cache is the biggest performance issue. That 16MB cache on the new
drive will give you a significant performance improvement.

And RAID will improve things even further.