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best gaming hard drive setup??

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moko

Registered
Joined
Dec 7, 2004
i was thinking of a wd120gb 8meg buffer for main with a 74gb raptor just for my games....and what raid array??
 
AFAIK you cannot run a RAID array with 2 different speed drives. Also RAID 0 provides very minimal perfromance increase and increases the risk of total data loss. I would suggest using the Raptor for OS, games and apps. Then use the other onw for storage. You would want your OS on the fastest drive as just having games on it would nto help much.
 
thanks......is that the best setup for games.....also thought about putting a "image" of my games on disk to help load faster...like alcohol 120%
 
well once you install games they are on your harddrive anyways..... not many games read alot of off the CDROM any more as they are so slow, often the cd rom is used as a security check to be sure u own the game and it is legal.
 
Mr.Guvernment said:
well once you install games they are on your harddrive anyways..... not many games read alot of off the CDROM any more as they are so slow, often the cd rom is used as a security check to be sure u own the game and it is legal.

Hehe, look at my sig. 74GB Raptor for OS and Apps. The 300GB is for games since it has the 16MB cache and the 2x400s are for..ahem...everything else!!!
 
you can actually do software raid within windows xp and 2000 which does nt require having the same drives, but the drives have to be dynamic volumes instead of having primary partitions and extened partitions.. if you are interested google around, there are many different descriptions on how to setup software raid within windows... and the performance increase noticeable...
 
ok....thanks for the input....so would the games load faster on a 7200rpm 16m buffer? or a 10,000rpm 8m buffer? i think everyone says to best have my os and apps on the 10000 raptor,....but why not the games.....im thinking of being on a server where they have the maps change every 15 min....and im one of the last one's to get in on the action.....lol ...so any seconds matter alot to me on loading the maps.
 
Burner27 said:
Hehe, look at my sig. 74GB Raptor for OS and Apps. The 300GB is for games since it has the 16MB cache and the 2x400s are for..ahem...everything else!!!

Well at least we know who the p0rn king is on ocforums.com :clap:
 
Loading new maps is affected by a lot more than just drive speed. Number 1 is the amount of ram you have. Then connection speed comes into the mix (ping time) and your overall system. I play a lot of online games that does map changing and I am usually one of the first ones in and I only run one 200gb western digitial drive ide and only 7200rpm.
 
For the one of the fastest currently available and affordable disk subsystem, run a 74GB Raptor for boot/OS and another 74GB Raptor for program installations. This allows access to both OS and game files and maps as quickly as affordable. SCSI can be a bit faster, but for most users is not worth the additional cost, unless long term reliability is factored in. Even then, there are varied opinions.

I have to agree with Devilhorse, RAM and networks are the primary keys to good performance. Insufficient RAM will result in rapid paging and bad peformance. Without a fast network connection, the data will not be available to any part of the system and play will suffer.
 
thanks devilram and eaotic,i'm asking all this because im upgrading my comp and before i buy....want to know what to get.....i play bf42,moh,cod mostly;i do have 3/384 dsl from bellsouth,pings are between 50 and 100,depending which room im in.i would like 2 raptors....but if i only get 1,should i put games on it?...i think so.also not to start a new thread for memory....what's best memory setup that you'll use for gaming rig?
 
You want at least a gig or ram. I have heard more than that you may get bottlenecks but I don't know for sure. A lot also depends if you are gonna over clock it or not. I run PQI Turbo Dual Channel pc3200 on this sytem. I also overclock however. The cosair value select isn't too bad and has a pretty nice price if you gonna stay pretty much stock. It will OC but not as well as some of the others. Your hard drives aren't gonna affect your gaming that much. They might a very little but not enough you will notice. Even in a raid form. You would never know the difference running it all on one instead of OS on one and games on the other. The benefit of two drives is if you have an application that is pulling more than one resource at a time it can pull it from two drives and it will make it a little faster. It would show more speed using two drives for someone doing something like video editing.
 
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