raptor for boot drive or dedicated "game drive"?

so.. I have a 320g barracuda on the way.. will prolly end up reformatting after it comes cause things are seeming pretty slow lately... been around a year since I've reformatted.. just wondering what you people would recommend for a drive setup?..

I find it pretty F'ing amazing how slow game/app loading gets just from "time" and installing junk etc on windows...(seriously.. for an example.. I go from being the first in game in bf2 on a fresh reformat to getting in the game after half the daym map has already been captured and people already have kills...)
I have yet to find a way to speed things up with a windows install other than reformatting... (defrag/reg cleaning forget it...)

have the 74g raptor as my main disk atm with some games on it.. and a 120 deskstar.. games seem equally slow loading from either atm.. think it would be better to use a partition on the new 320g as a boot drive and the raptor for games "only" or no?

I use a 74 gb for os, programs, and some games. I have a 150gb for the rest of the games and a 500 caviar for misc data.

Keep your OS and games on the Raptor and defrag twice a week.

I just installed a 36GB Raptor for boot/programs. I notice a huge difference when it comes to loading games. It feels like the times are almost cut in half. I ran a WD 80GB IDE drive before.

I had raptor for windows once.... it didnt seem to boot into windows any faster...

fabulouscoops said:

Keep your OS and games on the Raptor and defrag twice a week.

Click to expand...

This is what I did, I'd recommend going that way.

fabulouscoops said:

Keep your OS and games on the Raptor and defrag twice a week.

Click to expand...

That's exactly what I do with my 2 36 gig raided raptors.

well.. "seeming pretty slow lately" was kinda a understatement... finally reformatted yesterday.. decided to do a couple before and after benchmarks..

raptor before reformat:


raptor after reformat:


and the 320 barracuda..(before and after stayed about the same)


the raptor still seems kinda low oh well..
(but WOW the before speeds and cpu usage... argh windows)

Ogerx said:

well.. "seeming pretty slow lately" was kinda a understatement... finally reformatted yesterday.. decided to do a couple before and after benchmarks..

raptor before reformat:
[-IMG]http://home.comcast.net/~xergo/raptorbefore.JPG[/IMG]

raptor after reformat:
[-IMG]http://home.comcast.net/~xergo/raptorafter.JPG[/IMG]

and the 320 barracuda..(before and after stayed about the same)
[-IMG]http://home.comcast.net/~xergo/fattydrive.JPG[/IMG]

the raptor still seems kinda low oh well..(but WOW the before speeds.. argh windows)

Click to expand...

Crikey, that's way low.....you should defrag

Even the after #'s seem a bit low, the transfer speeds and the latency.

That's my Stripe Raptors.

Defrag dude!
Get diskeeper 2007 pro premium and never get that pathetic fragmentation state again.
You must also keep at least 20% of the drive free or windows performance totally blows.

Telstar said:

You must also keep at least 20% of the drive free or windows performance totally blows.

Click to expand...

Ok, now that makes no sense....

thideras said:

Ok, now that makes no sense....

Click to expand...

I free'd up 45gig on the drive before reformatting and tried the benchmark and still got the same 9-10megs a sec.. so dunno if I believe that one either.. I understand how the stuff on the "end" of the drive will be slower though..

anyway I changed my out look on defragging... only took hundreds of reformats over 10 years or so to get a clue there..
(after a fresh format and like nothing on the drive reinstalled yet I still found it 35% fragmented already ...)

thideras said:

Ok, now that makes no sense....

Click to expand...

why not? BTW, Windows defrag sux(?)