Lets Make It FAST!!!!

jazzy763

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Apr 13, 2009
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MOD....This looked like the best place to post this topic, please move if I was wrong. I may even be at the wrong site...I don't know. Just let me know.
Well, I did some research on the matter of separating things like the OS, Programs, files and folders to other drives in order to speed up my system. After a whole afternoon and dozens of articles and web pages, with opinions varying so much, I now know why this topic is not often covered in your typical magazine or book. There was a dizzying array of set ups from simple one volume 2 partitions to one volume 6 partitions or multiple hard drives with multiple partitions......... ......although a number of the people gave good reasons for doing their particular set up, two things came to mind. The first was that I didn't see any "hard" evidence like benchmarks to support their claims of increased speed. The other, was that among the set ups, I didn't feel any of them spoke to me or my present set up.


How I use the computer: I currently use this computer for.....gaming, newbie overclocking, video conversion and editing (i.e. avi to DVD), video streaming to other computers in the house, torrents, storing large music and video files, Web surfing etc...etc.
My goal:
1) To use the current hardware\software listed below to the best of its abilities
2) Speed up system response- ie. faster OS response, opening a program or accessing data for a game
3) Flexibility to do a clean install of the OS without having to reload the whole computer.....I think you get the idea.

Current Hardware:
Asus Rampage Extreme X48
Intel core 2 Quad Q9550 (currently at stock speed)
Kingston Hyper X ddr3 Ram capable of 1600 MHz( 4 X 1028 currently)
Seagate 7200.10 (4 x 320gigs currently in system) 2 more are on hand and available for use
2x Radeon Hd 2900 pro video cards with 1gig of ram each
Creative Labs sound card
PSU Ultra X3 1000w
Koolance Water cooling system for the Cpu,Northbridge,graphics cards and memory

Software I use the most:
Vista Ultimate 64
Nero 8 Ultra
Norton's 360 v. 3.0
MS office 2003
Intel Matrix manager (software raid)
Adobe Master Collection CS4
Various games ( ie Crysis, GTA4,WOW)
IE8

I know that I will be able to do a number of things to increase speed on my system like tweaking the hardware/Software. I would like to get the hard drives sorted first and then start tweaking hardware/software next.

Just a note: The motherboard can support up to 6 hard drives in a Raid 0,1,5 and 10 config and combinations thereof using "Matrix Raid". The motherboard also has an additional 2 sata ports to be used independently of the above 6 ports in any config I would like.
I know its a lot. I tried to give as much info as possible so that you can help me in my quest. Now, I guess, I just hope that not only am I in the right place,but, I hope someone here has the knowledge,ability and willingness to point me in the right direction. Thank you.
 
Putting multiple partitions on a single drive NEVER enhances performance. If you put two equal-sized partitions on a drive then you're forcing the access arm to move almost half or more of it's full stroke distance every time it accesses data in alternating partitions - that's a BAD thing.

There are valid reasons to create multiple partitions on a disk (for example Linux administrators often do it to ensure that partitions with critical files can't fill up with unwanted data), but performance isn't one of them.

One way of partitioning that DOES help performance is if you buy a disk bigger than you need (ie, 1TB drive to hold 100GB of OS files) and create just one small partition on it. That will keep all of the disk accesses to a narrow band of tracks which will reduce seek times. And if it's at the beginning of the disk (which it will be if you just create one partition on an otherwise-empty drive) then it will get the benefit of the higher data density on the outermost cylinders, which increases transfer rates and also helps seek time a bit too since you don't have to seek as far if more data fits on each cylinder.

You don't necessarily have to partition a drive to get the benefits I just mentioned - you'll also get them if you don't put very many files on the drive and if you defragment it so that all the files are kept near the start of the partition.
 
If you have the power and connectivity to use all 6 of your drives, and if you don't need more than 750GB of capacity, your best bet for performance would probably to use RAID 0+1 (two 3-disk RAID0 sets mirrored as a RAID 1 set).

You could try to use individual drives or multiple RAID1 or RAID0 sets and try to allocate busy files to different drives/sets, but you'll likely end up with some sets more busy and others less busy most of the time. The beauty of one large RAID set is that it will tend to average the accesses over all your drives so that the load is well balanced most of the time.

One giant six-drive RAID0 set would give you even better performance and more capacity, but you'd be six times more vulnerable to loosing ALL your data than you would be with individual non-RAIDed drives (six individual drives have just as much chance of failure, but you'd only loose the data on the one drive that failed).
 

neon neophyte

Splendid
BANNED
"Putting multiple partitions on a single drive NEVER enhances performance."

not true. if you partition a drive into 2 drives, you will get one drive that performs better than the unparitioned drive did, and one drive that performs worse. sort of.

accessing different parts of the disc, has different levels of performance. if you seperate the high performance part of a drive from the lower performance part of the drive (the rings on the outside of the disc have higher throughput. same is true for cds, dvds and anything that uses a disc to store information.) and then only use the high performance part of the drive, you WILL see increases in speed.

the name of this technique is eluding me at the moment. usually it involves NOT using the slower part of the drive at all, tho.
 
It's true that accesses to JUST the one partition will be faster than accesses to the WHOLE DISK. But if you're accessing files in BOTH partitions (and why would you put a 2nd partition onto the disk unless you plan to access it?) then you're forcing the head to move across the WHOLE DISK anyway - that's why it's a performance hit.

What it boils down to is the frequency with which you alternate accesses to the different partitions. If you never or only rarely access the 2nd partition, then you would get better performance for accesses to the 1st partition. But it doesn't take very many accesses to the 2nd partition to start slowing things down.