So I recently built a workstation for Solidworks, AMD Quadcore, 8gigs of RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX3700, but I am using two Seagate 250gb 16mb cache 7200rpm harddrives, the Baracuda line I believe.
Would it be worthwhile to upgrade to 32mb hard drives or just wait for SSD drives and maybe run the two drives in a raid, or get a WD Velociraptor (although I worry about their reliability compared to Seagate, just personal preference)?
I have never done a raid setup though so not sure what to do, plus, I'm guessing I'll have to reinstall everything either way. Any help is greatly appreciated.
Things are running find, but would any of these changes make it blazingly different?
would definately raid... more cache better but not as much a difference as going to raid 1 at least... in my experience. if you raid 1 tho ur only going to have 250g of storage and that wouldnt last me long... -J
yeah Raid 0 is a suicide mission... Raid 1 is better for integrity
But I think he meant same thing I did that raid 1 is almost twice as fast for getting data off drives then not having a raid system at all because there are two copies available for extraction, thus twice the bandwidth off drives, but somewhat slower when writiting because of the double work, but as far as your experince with a GUI you notice read lags more than writes, assuming you have enough ram that it's not too dependant of pagefile.
Plus if one drive crashes you dont have to worry about lossing anything...
I would raid 1 until I ran out of space then go get better drives... cost to goto Raid1 for this guy is almost negligable to increase performance compaird to buying new velocity drives.
... raid 1 is almost twice as fast for getting data off drives then not having a raid system at all because there are two copies available for extraction, thus twice the bandwidth off drives, ...
Only if the RAID controller supports this. Not all of them do. Most of the motherboard-based controllers do not do this, and read at the same speed as a single drive.
------------------------------- SomeJoe7777
"Did he dazzle you with his extensive knowledge of mineral water? Or was it his in-depth analysis of, uh, uh, Marky Mark that finally reeled you in?" - Troy Dyer (Ethan Hawke), Reality Bites, 1994
Reply to SomeJoe7777
yes... my point was that a raid card is much cheeper way to get faster drive speed than buying faster drives concidering his situation. u are absolutly correct that his mb would not support the desired effect. he would need a card but compaired to buying 2 velocity raptors thats a small price to pay.. and even then I would still buy the card and the two new drives.... lol -J
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