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Help me decide! Fast RAM or SATA Raid 0

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MoreGooder

Member
Joined
Dec 13, 2003
Location
Saint Louis, MO USA
Hey peeps,

I have some money left over from my tax return and I'm having a hard time deciding on my next upgrade.

My sig below shows what I have as far as memory (PC3700). I've been reading and following the Komosa memory threads and have learned a great deal. Last night I took out all but one of my memory sticks, changed to 3:2 memory timings, and then testind my overclock potential of my CPU. I was able to post at 280 FSB! That taks my P4 2.4C to a staggering 3.360GHz! Of course, that's with just one stick. Two sticks may not be as fast. Right now, I have four sticks of PC3700 and I can do no better than 233 FSB.

....but..... DDR2 is around the corner, so DDR mem price might fall.

The other issue is my hard drives. I have a Maxtor 114GB drive that is painfully slow. My Mobo has Sata capabilities, but I'm not utilizing it at all. What a waste. I can buy two 120Gb Seagate barracuda's for $90 shipped each, or two 60GB's for $74 each.

....but..... SATA2 is around the cornder, so SATA price might fall too.

What would you do?
 
I'll take the other side of the bench on this one. Go with the RAM. With that 2.4C, you'll be able to run 1:1 at very high FSB's(280+?) with some pc4400 or so.
 
Ugh..... Still can't decide. I wonder if I'll see a net improvement in my game applications if I go with faster RAM. But.....Battlefield takes 4evR to load.

I think I have to decide if I'm impatient (thus faster hard drives) or speed hungry (thus faster RAM). Oh wait.... those are one in the same really!

Grrrr.....
 
Yeah, good luck with the decision.

Either way it's an improvement :p

Remeber, it's all about what you do mainly with the comp that should determine what to purchase.

I'd go with the HDs since I have around 40 GB of anime and then games to add, etc. (how do i manage to fit it all on an 80 GB??)

If you really want to blow some money, get two Raptors lol :D
 
Yeah, really... I looked into dual Raptors. $336 after $100 mail in rebates from New Egg. EEEEK! That's some crazy dollars.

One thing's for certain. I won't buy SATA unless I buy two drives and setup a Raid 0 array. Not worth it otherwise I think.
 
Why would you need 2 of the 74 GB raptors? Get 2 of the 36 GB ones and RAID em. Keep the Maxtor for backup where speed isn't as important.
 
All things considered, you will notice a RAIDed SATA setup a LOT more than you will notice another 10% more ram bandwidth. You'd be amazed how much more responsive a machine can be when it has a good fast harddrive in it...

Boot times go down, level load times go down, just doing normal everyday tasks goes so much faster. Why? Because realistically, the harddrive is the slowest data-component of your machine. Your processor can compute 100's of billions of operations per second, and your ram can transmit around five billion bits of information back and forth per second...

But your disk drives? They're lucky to pump out fifty million bits per second. Yeah, fifty million is a lot, but not in comparison to the multi-billions of ops that your computer COULD be doing if it were simply done being loaded from the comparitively slow drive.

I love fast ram, but in your scenario, a fast set of drives will be MUCH more noticeable.
 
Albuquerque said:
All things considered, you will notice a RAIDed SATA setup a LOT more than you will notice another 10% more ram bandwidth. You'd be amazed how much more responsive a machine can be when it has a good fast harddrive in it...

Boot times go down, level load times go down, just doing normal everyday tasks goes so much faster. Why? Because realistically, the harddrive is the slowest data-component of your machine. Your processor can compute 100's of billions of operations per second, and your ram can transmit around five billion bits of information back and forth per second...

But your disk drives? They're lucky to pump out fifty million bits per second. Yeah, fifty million is a lot, but not in comparison to the multi-billions of ops that your computer COULD be doing if it were simply done being loaded from the comparitively slow drive.

I love fast ram, but in your scenario, a fast set of drives will be MUCH more noticeable.

He has a point. . .
 
Thanks Albuquerque. You've convinced me!
Off to ebay for some 36GB Raptors.

In Raid 0, that would double the capacity, so I can definitely live with that! I can install all of the software on it, keeping data on the Maxtor. This means that if my Raid 0 crashes or becomes corrupted I haven't lost anything other than the time required to reformat and reinstall.
 
MoreGooder said:
Thanks Albuquerque. You've convinced me!
Off to ebay for some 36GB Raptors.

In Raid 0, that would double the capacity, so I can definitely live with that! I can install all of the software on it, keeping data on the Maxtor. This means that if my Raid 0 crashes or becomes corrupted I haven't lost anything other than the time required to reformat and reinstall.

1) Your going to have to decide whether you want to use the "Promise" or the Intel "ICH5R" direct SATA.

2) Find your optimum RAID0 and cluster combination.

3) Try running your CAS3 at CAS2.5 timing.

Don't forget BIOS:D
 
I'd just use the onboard Intel ICH5R interface, as it doesn't soak up PCI bandwidth since the raid interface is right off the southbridge. Plugging your drives into the promise controller would soak up PCI bandwidth while transferring files...
 
MoreGooder said:
Thanks Albuquerque. You've convinced me!
Off to ebay for some 36GB Raptors.

In Raid 0, that would double the capacity, so I can definitely live with that! I can install all of the software on it, keeping data on the Maxtor. This means that if my Raid 0 crashes or becomes corrupted I haven't lost anything other than the time required to reformat and reinstall.

exactly

i run 2 36s with a 120 wd caviar for storage..

you will cackle with glee once you see how fast your system gets on the raptors...
ram would be hardly noticeable if at all...
 
OK, folks.... Update time.

I purchased two Deskstars (Hitachi) 7200 RMP Sata drives from Newegg. 80GB capacity each. I have them set up in a RAID 0, with 32kbyte stripe and 32kbyte block size.

These things scream. In fact, I repeatedly score 90MB/sec transfer rate on Sandra. The 37 GB Raptors score 95 according to the Sandra comparison data.

Windows XP loaded in exactly 17 minutes.

I think the reason for the high score is because the Hitachi Deskstar has a good seek rate and overall top performance for IDE technology. This is basically a souped up IDE drive with the SATA bridge chip on it. But, man does it work and work well. It's been a long long time since I've seen hard disk activity drawing more than 15% CPU usage! Those bad boys are dumping some serious data into memory across the southbridge!

I'm happy :D
 
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