Final queries before ordering

[dr4g0nf1y]

I've gone backwards and forwards over ordering what and how to set it up. I've gone with the F3's mainly over price than anything although people have still said these run a bit faster than the caviar blacks.

I wanted to RAID but all I've heard is bad things for a gaming rig, so I may just have to connect the 2 drives and have one as a C: and the other as a D: drive.

So does everyone agree that this is the best way;

2x 500gb F3's in parallel - one for os and other for gaming?

 

[dr4g0nf1y]

If you call 10 - 20% "noticeable" then yes.

I don't.

e.g. 20 secs down to 16 - 18 secs.

Not willing to pay for an SSD as it's just not plausible to do that with what's available.

so what is the issue because now I'm hearing different things. I thought that if you had two drives in RAID then performance should be at maximum twice or fast, access times increased and load time for games take longer.

All I'm after is improved performance over a single drive so I don't mind what the performance boost is, as long as it's an improvement

What if I added a third drive into the equation?

 

[dr4g0nf1y]

Game load times will go down becasue it can stream the level data faster.

Sorry if I'm getting you to repeat yourself but could you expand on this?

My system like many others on ocuk is just for gaming, I have a year old computer running off an E8500 and has sufficient space to backup/store work on, so I'm not worried about backing up/losing info on this system.

If I used 3 drives in RAID I know it'll be an improvement than 2 but obviously not to the same degree in performance gain, but how can load times be improved for the OS but not for gaming?

 

[dr4g0nf1y]

I have yet to see anyone on these boards show benchmarks of game loading times with/without RAID, which is why I posted my findings. Everyone seems to throw benchmarks around and "yeh m8, your system will feel a lot faster!" without any numbers to back up their objective statements.

I guess it's mainly down to the time it takes to install an os on a single drive, update it, hd tune it and use a game to also benchmark or something.

... then set up a raid and do it all again

... then use a different dive or more and do it again

I haven't RAID'ed myself and want to give this ago with these inexpensive discs before jumping ahead to a SSD, hopefully in the meantime they'll also lower in price.

With what I quoted last time I just read it wrong, getting confused between increased data speed and decreased load time which is essentially the same thing.

I appreciate the effort you went through Jim to do what you did, I'll definety go over that thread again but with different drives and boards available the whole speed thing is relative so I think most people would still give it a go and experience for themselves

Cheers guys

p.s. might try 3 drives lol

 

[dr4g0nf1y]

Considering they're now only focusing on Hard Drives being the main bottleneck and from what you're saying it's hard to depict where this speed problem is located.

the only place I'd expect it to be is between the s/nb and the internal bus but this would practically be the same for the runnings of the os.

the only thing I can think of is that it's the os slowing things down and securom based devices and possibly even an optical drive (in the sense the os checks for a disc).