Raid 0 Set up help...

ok, i am here, to save you from yourself (not really, i just like playing myself up). anyways, ok don't buy raptors, save yourself time money and such, and ask yourself, are you willing to burn your own money, if so get them, if not, then dont. for pure speed purposes raid is indeed the way to, for redundancy it is as well, for speed go raid 0, or 0+1, for redundancy go raid 1, 0+1 or raid 5. i can tell you right now, if you want to do this to make your computer seem more responsive, this is not the way to do it, if you really want make your computer extremely responsive, get a ram drive. otherwise you are wasting money, also dont buy a raptor simply because you can make one, after much research i have figured them out.

a raptor is actually just like any other drive, except it spins a bit faster, and only uses part of the discs, it uses the outer portion in fact, get sandra and bench your hard drive, you will see your read rates highest on the outside of the platters, and slowest on the inside. you can make your own raptor by simply partitioning that outer portion (at most 50% of the drive, altho something like 20% or 30% is more realistic, but whatever size you like) as your primary partition, and the rest as storage. and dont buy a caviar, you seem partial to western digital and thats ok, but there are better options. mainly perpendicular drives are faster, and more GB/$ then others the sweet spot being the Seagate 7200.10 320GB for just under $100

if you really want to raid and are limited on budget, do this, get 2 or 3 Seagate 7200.10's and raid them and do the partitioning scheme on them to get even faster speeds, or get a ram drive, and use that for windows and your smaller primary apps (games dont need fast hard drives btw it leads to no appreciable performance increase) then you will have lots of space and speed, conversely if you have a money is no object position. then skip the raptors and go for 15,000 RPM cheetahs or the like, and get at least 3 of them, and raid them, and you see miracles like windows boot in under 5 seconds.

if you are god, and you own all the money anyways, then get 2 ram drives, and raid those, and you may not even be able to discern the pause in loading apps,. (im actually going to do this on my next build if i ever save that much money) you should also put your paging file on the fastest medium you have, and that will make swapping much much faster.

for the Ramdisks at 4GB each (i-RAM rev 1.3) you will have a hard time to reduce the load time of all your apps if you happen to have a lot of them

(4x Raid 0 is like 16GB 8O windows for some odd reason takes 4GB, then there is games and office...)

and I imagine it will be a hassle to troubleshoot it too... is it the battery or the RAM?

you know, if they fully buffered the RAM why not the drive (perhaps because the drive is way slower than cache, but oh well)? it will cost a crapload of money but you can't beat the performance

Make that "very large crapload" 8O
Synergy6

This is something that I would like to do. But I have a question about partitioning (sorry to hijack the thread). Say I use partition magic for example, to partition the outer portion. How do I know which is the physical outer portion of the disk based in partition magic (or any other partitioning program)?

I have not set up a RAID yet, so I am confused about how, if I'm in a RAID O configuration, I would set up the partitions. I hope my question is clear. Thanks.

through trial and error, and benchmarking partitions, i can pretty much assure you that with with partition magic the first partition you create (on an otherwise blank hard drive) will begin on the outermost section of the hard drive, successively working towards the center. you will not be able to match a raptor for the simple reason that it is 10,000RPM (if your using a 7,200RPM drive) but it does have a measurable impact on performance, and i have noticed that i can fit roughly 30GB of my drive into a region on my hdd that has an average speed of 70MB/s which is not bad considering its only 7200RPM. i personally try to put windows, my paging file and small apps on the outermost portion, then partitioning larger areas for storage and game installs. (i dont mind game load times so much, and its unrealistic to fit the 50GB of install base they take onto the outer portion)