Couple storage questions

[Firestrider]

I just benchmarked each one of my hard drives and my flash drive for fun and I'm wondering which would be best for games, which would be best for storage, and which would be best for the operating system, and why:

RAID0: 94.8 MB/s Burst 50.7 MB/s Avg. Read 15.2 Rand. Access
Raptor (8Mb Cache): 100.7 MB/s Burst 49.4 MB/s Avg. Read 8.7 Rand. Access
Flash: 21.8 MB/s Burst 21.1 MB/s Avg. Read 0.6 Rand. Access

On another topic: I get upwards of 700 memory Hard faults/sec and 98% memory usage in Resource Manager in Vista when running an ORTHOS blend test, does that mean I need more RAM?

My vista windows experience index is 5.3, 5.9, 5.9, 5.9, 5.3 does that mean my processor and hard drive are the bottlenecks in my system?

What exactly does ReadyBoost do, would it decrease Windows Load up time?

[Quick69GTO]

Use the Raptor for Windows and software.
Depending on the capacity of each RAID 0 drive, I would break the RAID and run each one individually.
Save your pennies for an identical Raptor and run both of them in RAID 0.
Image the Raptor array every month or more and store the image on the storage drives (old RAID 0 drives broken up).
You may want to test the memory using memtest if you are getting memory hard faults.
Test each memory chip individually if you have multiple chips installed. If your memory passes then ignore Orthos. It may have issues with Vista.
Forget the experience index. I have seen $7000+ gaming systems get no more that 6.0 on that crappy little index. There is hacks out there for modifying that index. Use one and give your system a perfect index.
ReadyBoost is used for an alternative pagefile (among other things) for Vista to use versus the hard drive. Data is written to both but Vista will pull data from the ReadyBoost flash drive first before accessing the hard drive. It's used mainly for low memory situations. If you have 2gig or more of system memory, ReadyBoost is unnecessary.

Hope all this helps.

[jiggamanjb]

Use the Raptor for Windows and software.
Depending on the capacity of each RAID 0 drive, I would break the RAID and run each one individually.
Save your pennies for an identical Raptor and run both of them in RAID 0.
Image the Raptor array every month or more and store the image on the storage drives (old RAID 0 drives broken up).
You may want to test the memory using memtest if you are getting memory hard faults.
Test each memory chip individually if you have multiple chips installed. If your memory passes then ignore Orthos. It may have issues with Vista.
Forget the experience index. I have seen $7000+ gaming systems get no more that 6.0 on that crappy little index. There is hacks out there for modifying that index. Use one and give your system a perfect index.
ReadyBoost is used for an alternative pagefile (among other things) for Vista to use versus the hard drive. Data is written to both but Vista will pull data from the ReadyBoost flash drive first before accessing the hard drive. It's used mainly for low memory situations. If you have 2gig or more of system memory, ReadyBoost is unnecessary.

Hope all this helps.

Couldn't agree more...

[Firestrider]

I was under the impression that hard faults are not a bad thing with the memory it just indicated that you might need more memory space, as I can run memtest fine for ~8 hours.

As one guy defined it: When ever the CPU needs to access part of the RAM that has been swapped out, the memory manager unit (MMU) throws a "Page Fault" instructing the Windows kernel to swap an old page out of memory on to the Hard Drive and swap the required page back in to RAM. Hence, if you are out of RAM, the number of "Faults per second" will naturally rise.

What I meant with the questions is if there is a certain scenario where I would need high read/writes for one thing, and low access times for another thing? Do they pretty much go hand in hand with every scenario?

Like, for example, thought the flash drive would be good for the pagefile and windows load up time because of the fast access time.

[Quick69GTO]

Here 'ya go:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_fault
Read it and generate your own opinion.
Reading your sig tells me your PC has plenty of memory.
If you are using all 2gig of your memory on a regular basis then adding more might be a solution for you.
System memory will always be faster than a hard drive/flash drive ReadyBoost situations.
With 2gig of system memory and a ReadyBoost flash drive utilized, boot times will not be shorter than using only the system memory (at least that's the general consensus).
Experiment for yourself. If it does shave off seconds from your PCs boot times, then your PC likes ReadyBoost, and I will gladly admit I was wrong.
I would be interested to see if ReadyBoost will shave boot times using 4gig of system memory.