Can A SATA HD be yoour master ?

[Scottie]

I just upgraded my computer form a Athlon 1.1 GHz to a XP3200 Barton but it doesn't feel fast enough for me, will replaceing my 7200 RPM IDE HD with a 10000 RPM SATA HD make a big difference ?

Can I use a SATA HD as a master ?

Thanks for your replys !

[ViRaL1]

If your mobo supports it you can. You'd probably see more of a performance increase upgrading to 1GB of RAM though, and it would cost you less. When you say not fast enough, what are you doing that doesn't seem to be fast enough?

[Scottie]

The only noticeable difference from what I can tell is that I can play some games I couldn't before.

[tonyp12]

If you want file speed, get two SATA drives in Raid0 config.

That is of cource if your motherboard supports Raid.


I have the "cheap" ASRock K7S8XE+ and I just did a setup with raid0.
Using two 80GB Maxtor SATA (cost around $73 each)
Sandra now shows a 83mb/s

Hint:
Always get the latest BIOS to support boot from SATA.
I had to press ctrl+s to enter Raid/Sata setup ruding boot.
Create SATA driver on floppy disk to use during Windows Install.
See you mobo manual on how to this.

[Scottie]

I read aboit about Raid and I don't want that, I just want to hook up 1 SATA HD and make it go faster.

I have a MSI K7N2 Delta MB and it suports SATA and RAID

[tonyp12]

I heard some bad things about raid to.

One is if one drive failes (in raid0) you will loose everything.
But the failure rates on todays hd are very,very small.

So if you are looking for one single 10k 80GB Sata
maybe should look in to two 7.2k 40GB in Raid instead.

It's is faster than any single 10k drive.

I would say it was an easy setup, even if it was my first time.

[thecoalman]

Installing a SATA drive will only increase performance in how fast your apps load up or save. Once there actually running it will have no affect on performance unless the app requires the drive (e.g capturing video). Stay away from RAID0 unless your data is expendable. Like Viral said increasing your RAM will have more of an affect on performace besides loading and saving.

Like I said before you may not see a noticeable difference with the new processor until you actually use a app that uses a lot of processing power such as encoding, that's where you'll see the performance boost. I see where some peolple have to let the computer encode practically overnight for a 1 hour video. With a processor like yours your looking at a few hours if not in real time. See this thread: https://www.videohelp.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=234977

[Scottie]

Yeah I fugure that, that's what I want faster HD speeds.

[rallynavvie]

RAID 0 :yawn:
There's no need for it. The only RAID I use is nested RAID on SCSI drives.

Also the 37GB Raptors are louder than their 74GB counterparts so running two in RAID would be much noisier than the single 74GB one. I run a single 74GB Raptor as my boot on my new computer and love the thing. Almost as fast as the SCSI boot array I use on the other computer but a lot less noise. I highly recommend one, especially if you have onboard SATA controllers.

[tonyp12]

Don't yawn raid0.

Download SiSoftware Sandra and do a File System Benchmark
http://downloads.guru3d.com/download.php?det=177

I bet your scsi or raptor does not even get 40mb/s.
Probably no even 35mb/s.

I get 83mb/s with two very quiet MAXTOR 6Y080M0.

Sandra shows that they did a test with four 10k sata Raptors in raid0
and got 144mb/s, that is fast.

[rallynavvie]

There's no need for it.

Show me an application where you would need that much data bandwidth. Games don't need it, loading up maps and such is half drive speed half memory bandwidth. Video encoding doesn't exceed single IDE drive limitations. For servers you're still not going to beat a nested SCSI array because it combines more transfer speeds as well as far superior access times.

I stand by my opinion that plain old RAID 0 is for bragging rights, actual application would be better suited to RAID 5 set-ups. I had two IDE drives in RAID 0 on the old SMP machine and had one failed stripe and that pretty much did it for me. From what I had seen in practical use of the volume it wasn't worth even one crash. The single Raptor or SCSI is faster than the single IDE and the faster seek times are nice, especially for a boot volume, and your odds of drive failure have been statistically cut in half.

[Scottie]

Thanks for your replys,

yeah I still just want one SATA 10K RPM HD for my Boot Disk

I don't want raid or scsi

[tonyp12]

For the power user!

Get Five 80gb Sata drives in RAID-XL configuration.

Fast as Raid0 but relialable as raid5.

The PCI card cost $249
http://store.syncraid.com/sr5103.html

review:
http://www17.tomshardware.com/storage/20031128/index.html

[rallynavvie]

For the power user!

Meh, apparently because my primary workstation doesn't use a lick of RAID in any form I don't qualify as a "power user"

[handyguy]

A 3200 Barton only operates @ 2.2ghz. You could do better with a faster chip.

[Scottie]

I know but I just spent all my money on this upgrade, in another year I will upgrade my other computer faster then this one, maybe.

[adam]

I get use out of my raid0 setup all the time. Lots of things max out hard drive speed, and depend on almost nothing else. Try running pulldown with source on raid0 and output going to another drive, and then try doing it between two non-raid setups. Huge difference in speed!

You get similar results with transcoders. My transcoding speed is cut in half when use raid0. And then there's those occasions where I would just rather have a file on this drive rather then that drive. Raid0 makes all the difference there.

I didn't know that the 74 gig raptors were quieter but damn, how quiet do you need? I'm running two 37 gig 10k Raptors in raid 0 and I can get right up next to them and still not hear anything.

[tonyp12]

I take it you have 4 drives set up as dual Raid0.

I like my newly setup raid0.

But in theory what would be faster with huge video files?
Where the HD speed like in de-multiplexing matters.

1) Having the Source and destination on the same drive is really slow.

2) Have the source on one drive, and the
destination on another physical drive is fast.

3) doing option1 with a single Raid0 setup is as fast as option2?

4) Using option 2 but with two dual Raid0 is fastest (duh)

I think option2 is faster than 3, though having a raid0 will speed
up boot-time and loading programs and games etc.

[adam]

No just two drives in raid 0 and a bunch of other storage drives. Boot partition is on the raid array and the extra space is used for temp files. If one drive fails oh well, I replace it and break out GhostImage and never skip a beat. Whenever I process anything I set source and output to different drives. So I'm either reading from my IDE drives to my Sata array, or vice versa. Depending on the application, the speed really helps.

[rallynavvie]

Some people seem immune to computer noise I guess. My new machine is quiet in my opinion. My old machine is not, but then at a LAN party it was quieter than everyone else's so they figured mine for quiet. Now that it has SCSI hardware it's even less quiet. I need almost absolute quiet as both rigs reside in the same room as my home theater and I don't want the white-noise-like sound of PC fans running overcoming light conversation in a movie I'm watching.

What are the sustained transfer limits of 32-bit 33 MHz PCI slots as compared to 64-bit PCI-X @ 66, 100, or 133 MHz? I've asked this in other threads but nobody seemed to know the answer.

[ViRaL1]

Don't know about actual sustained transfer but these should be the figures for Max Theoretical throughput.

32-bit PCI @ 33MHz = ~132MB/s
64-bit PCI-X @ 133MHz = ~1GB/s (closer to 1066MB/s)

...and I'd assume
64-bit PCI-X @ 66MHz = ~533MB/s
64-bit PCI-X @ 100MHz = ~800MB/s