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Tom's HW review of West. Dig. new 8mb cache drive is pretty positive- is the cost really worth it? what say you all? anyone have one?
I know, I was talking about getting two small 2MB cache drives and setting up a RAID. It won't improve access time, as Ncogneto mentioned, but it will significantly improve sustained trasfer performance, which is a bottleneck.but I don't think they make that small a drive with 8mb of cache...- looks like 8mb only comes with 100gb HD's
This is impossible and a commonly misunderstood aspect of RAID be it SCSI or IDE RAID.If DOES improve seek time SLIGHTLY if you are using RAID 0/1 cuz it can grab from whichever disk is closest to the data
huh? you just said above that it did improve access, again not possible. And tell me when is a high sustained transfer rate neccesary? As for moveing to the next one more quickly as you put it, this is were seek times make a difference.RAID 0 does not improve seek, but when the transfer rate is important for many apps, and even the ones it isnt if the disks can read the data more quickly it can move on the the next task qucikly also
Moving large files, accessing the page file, opening a game, saving a game, opening large documents, opening large database apps, compiling a large program, saving large documents (multi-megabyte presentations for example), etc.And tell me when is a high sustained transfer rate neccesary?
Moving large files, accessing the page file, opening a game, saving a game, opening large documents, opening large database apps, compiling a large program, saving large documents (multi-megabyte presentations for example), etc.And tell me when is a high sustained transfer rate neccesary?
Well, copying the file onto another folder will speed up.1)Moving large files
perhaps, that is if you have another device capable of writing at the same speed as your stripe is reading, this would requite two stripes. Otherwise it is wasted.
True, true.2)accessing the page file
I kind of glad you stated it that way, see above about access times and raid levels. Here access times are nerely as important as STR, and proper optimization of the cache file is necessary, a stripe will do you nothing if your page files is fragmented.
Microsoft Access? Oracle? AutoCAD? Hmm, I guess I'm not a typical user.3)opening large documents, opening large database apps,
What apps? what data bases? We are talking about the typical user here ( at least I was)
It should significantly improve a slow loading game such as UT.3)opening a game
A bit, is one to three seconds it takes to open the game really going to make that much differnce?
Hmm, it depends on how you look at it. Sure, if you have 2 drives instead of 1 then there's twice the chance of one failing, but look at it this way:you are twice as likely to loose all your data in the case of disk failure.
The disadvantage is that B is twice as likely to happen as A.If you have one large hard drive and it fails then you've just lost all your data. If you have two smaller HDs in RAID 0 and one fails, you also lose your data. The end result is the same, so I don't see an advantage or disadvantage here.
Actually, I'm not the one who uses them, my dad does.Oracle? AutoCAD? I'm sorry, I didn't realize so many people used autocad
Agreed but what are you refering to as hardware? an Onboard Raid controller chip? If so this is not harware raid.Keep in mind a hardware RAID chip wont use much CPU compared to software
win2k pro only has striped no data protection
you listed so many I would have to dissect them one by one. suffice it to say many of the apps you listed would be much better served by two logical drives existing on seperate controllers and not two drives striped as one. The access times of going back and forth on one striped set would negate the fast read times( in the case of when you were dealing with dual read requests being place on the striped set)One point I dont get is you say "almost everything you listed there Raid would have a minimal impact on if it were the only logical drive on the system" which false, although I do have multiple drives in my machine.