Soldato
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Ahh, I've just seen how you've got things partitioned. I'm running a Gigabyte board and a couple of spare 320gb drives, so I may try this if I get a chance.
Modding a Barracuda or Spinpoint to get a cheap VelociRaptor
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Ahh, I've just seen how you've got things partitioned. I'm running a Gigabyte board and a couple of spare 320gb drives, so I may try this if I get a chance.
Soldato
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Thanks, I need to back up a few things first but once I've done that I'll check out Matrix RAID. It does sound like a nice way of doing things.
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This isn't really a new concept, it's been around since the intel ICH6 chipset! We're currenty on ICH10. It only works with mechanical drives as it uses the part of the drive with the lowest access time and highest transfer speeds.
Thanks for the suggestion trentlad. Matrix raid looks like an interesting solution much closer to what I thought I wanted. However, according to the article you linked (which is admitedly 5 years old) Matrix raid is only supported for Intel's ICH6R south bridge. I don't think this option exists for my gigabyte board with an amd phenom II. I assume the Matrix raid was mentioned in the manual and available in the bios settings. For my gigabyte board the options I can see are RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 (hope that's the right way around).
I was pretty much all set to go waith a RAID 0 OS and then just get a 1TB for storage, but learning that motherboard raid might not give that great performance increase and that software raid might be faster but is not supported in my Windows 7 Premium version I've been somewhat discouraged.
Rather than splash out a lot of money now for marginal improvements in performance I'm thinking I might just get another storage drive and back it up daily to my external storage, and wait another few months to see if the SSDs get a bit cheaper.
Are you doing that based on the assumption that windows RAID is fakeRAID and is so much faster because one person on here stated that?? I've never heard that before so be good if we had a source.
Regardless, don't you think it would be an extreme reliability issue using a Windows RAID for the reasons I stated previously? You're motherboard RAID will be extremely fast and I can 100% guarantee you will not notice the difference in speed between the two (if there is any).
Regardless, don't you think it would be an extreme reliability issue using a Windows RAID for the reasons I stated previously? You're motherboard RAID will be extremely fast and I can 100% guarantee you will not notice the difference in speed between the two (if there is any).
Soldato
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Short stroking drives is all about reducing access times (and increasing IOs). This is achieved by reformatting the drive so that only a part of the platter(s) are in use. This in turn means that the heads will never have to move very far.
You can’t short stroke a drive and then use the rest of the capacity. If you do the drive is no longer short stroked as the heads will have to move across the entire surface.
Short stroking can also never increase the maximum STR. If may improve the average STR but that’s just because you’re not using the slower parts of the drive.
Despite what Adrian Wong would have you believe it isn’t actually possible to ‘have your cake and eat it’. If you do believe it then I’ve got a bridge for sale you might be interested in.
You can’t short stroke a drive and then use the rest of the capacity. If you do the drive is no longer short stroked as the heads will have to move across the entire surface.
Short stroking can also never increase the maximum STR. If may improve the average STR but that’s just because you’re not using the slower parts of the drive.
Despite what Adrian Wong would have you believe it isn’t actually possible to ‘have your cake and eat it’. If you do believe it then I’ve got a bridge for sale you might be interested in.
Here's a source
http://kmwoley.com/blog/?p=429
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQiZVoJqyqo
I tested both and found windows7 raid and the intel matrix/motherboard raid (which is also software as the cpu does all the work and not hardware like some people think) were about the same performance wise.
Last week my windows 7 installation got corrupted and I just did a restore of my boot drive. My Velociraptors which had my Steam folder on it, and are striped using windows7 raid were unaffected.
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A lot of people are waiting for SSD's to drop in price.. thats not going to happen. What will happen is that the size will increase and the GB per £ will become more competetive.
I very much doubt that the Crucial C300 64GB will ever drop below £100 purely as it is selling so well the demand maintains that price and at the current price point, it is competetive enough already. There are countless posts on here about how wonderful SSD's are but as others have said, once you try one you cannot go back. As a result of that, I've now removed ALL my spinneys from my games machine and its just got the Revo.
I very much doubt that the Crucial C300 64GB will ever drop below £100 purely as it is selling so well the demand maintains that price and at the current price point, it is competetive enough already. There are countless posts on here about how wonderful SSD's are but as others have said, once you try one you cannot go back. As a result of that, I've now removed ALL my spinneys from my games machine and its just got the Revo.
Great links, thanks. I found the same arguments doing my own googling (so no I didn't base my decision just on the word of one post, but it was an eye opener that got me investigating). I would have shared some links, but I couldn't find anything as clear cut as your links above. Yes, they are just one guys testing, but coupled with various other articles and the arguments for your mobo dying leaving you in a fix with "fake" raid I think it is pretty convincing. I'm sure some mobos have better raid controllers than others, but I could find no information on that.
bremen1874 you are of course right that shortstroking cannot improve the max and nobody is claiming that you can. If you look at the charts in the links I posted you will see that. However, I don't understand your argument that you can't short stroke a disk by creating two partitions. Surely if you create the first partition as your OS and the second as storage all your OS and program data will be stored on the fastest part of the disk? Thus when stuff is loaded the heads will never leave the fast partition. If this is not correct I'd love an explanation or a link.
Thanks.
Soldato
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You can just use the rest of the drive for backup, storage, infrequently accessed data etc.
Well, if we see an increase in the GB per £ that IS effectively a drop in price (although likely it will be a gradual process)! As higher capacity drives become more affordable demand for low capacity SSDs, like the C300 64GB, will decline and eventually the effect should be lower prices. However, I wouldn't bet on any major price changes before X-Mas, but it should be very interesting to see how SSDs improve in the coming year.