You're going back to really old days of IDE interfaces there mate.
I don't think any of that matters with the new SATA hard disks, which is all you should be buying now.
What you can do is buy an SSD SATA drive and drop it into your system. Use that for your game installations and use a regular drive for your downloads. Make sure you have Windows 7 as that contains optimisations for SSD drives that help them last longer and prevents them from slowing down over time. I would also recommend that you redo your system and put your OS on the SSD drive with a full reinstall of Windows 7. That will give you the greatest benefit. I would also not recommend using a drive less than 128GB for your primary OS drive. Actually 256GB is probably the sweet spot for space.
If you really want to get fancy you can purchase one of the OCZ REVO Drives which are a PCI-E card that you plug into your machine. Your machine will recognise the card as a hard disk.
An SSD is the single upgrade that will have the largest effect on your productivity with your machine. Going from having windows take 1 to 2 minutes to load, to having a useable system in 12 to 15 seconds must be experienced to be believed.
Raid 0 a striping solves the sequential penalty of a ssd at the cost of increasing the risk of data loss due to drive failure. Raid 1-mirror does nothing positive for performance, but all but eliminates the fear of data loss. Personally I run a raid 0 for my active games and have a large backup drive. Win 7 does a good job at backups. Master/slave made me giggle... So long ago
with quiz's help i built me a nice gaming computer.. but I really didnt think an ssd would make a huge difference from a hdd and I am just getting back into the hardware stuff... So I am kinda well I am out of the game and I have no clue what the new stuff or raiding is all about hahaha
If you're switching from normal hard disk to SSD, I'd suggest buying one SSD first to see how fast it is, and then deciding if you need extra speed of using multiple in RAID.
Raid 0 a striping solves the sequential penalty of a ssd at the cost of increasing the risk of data loss due to drive failure. Raid 1-mirror does nothing positive for performance, but all but eliminates the fear of data loss. Personally I run a raid 0 for my active games and have a large backup drive. Win 7 does a good job at backups. Master/slave made me giggle... So long ago
Sequential penalty of a ssd? That's so 2009!
Todays SSDs have a sequential read/write speed of around 500mb/s. HDD's have less than half the speed even doing sequential read/writes.
SSD's are already very parallel - all the chips on the device (joined via channels) can be accessed independently by the controller, essentially acting as a large RAID 0 device with 6-8-10-however many channels the SSD has.
Yes, putting SSDs in RAID 0, and to a lesser extent 5, will help with their sequential times, but they are already very very fast.
One very large drawback to that, is that very few RAID controllers will support TRIM, which maintains the SSD's speed over time.
Redudant Array of Inexpsive Disks, RAID(oxymoron if there ever was one)
unless your are running 3 or more drives RAID 0 is at max a %20 increase over running 2 independant disks, and if one drive fails you lose the data on both drives.
just plug then in and listen to gel, then dont worry about a thing every little thing is gonna be alright
Originally posted by noturpal Redudant Array of Inexpsive Disks, RAID(oxymoron if there ever was one)
unless your are running 3 or more drives RAID 0 is at max a %20 increase over running 2 independant disks, and if one drive fails you lose the data on both drives.
just plug then in and listen to gel, then dont worry about a thing every little thing is gonna be alright
edit: noone runs raid 5 its all 0+1 or 1+0
Not true - lots of people run RAID 5. It's not typical in gaming computers though - but neither is RAID 10 - mostly because people don't want to run 3/4+ HD's in their system. But for places that need speed and reliability, RAID 5 is at least as common as RAID 10, if not more-so. It strikes an excellent balance between available capacity, fault tolerance, and performance.
Redudant Array of Inexpsive Disks, RAID(oxymoron if there ever was one)
unless your are running 3 or more drives RAID 0 is at max a %20 increase over running 2 independant disks, and if one drive fails you lose the data on both drives.
just plug then in and listen to gel, then dont worry about a thing every little thing is gonna be alright
edit:
noone runs raid 5 its all 0+1 or 1+0
Not true - lots of people run RAID 5. It's not typical in gaming computers though - but neither is RAID 10 - mostly because people don't want to run 3/4+ HD's in their system. But for places that need speed and reliability, RAID 5 is at least as common as RAID 10, if not more-so. It strikes an excellent balance between available capacity, fault tolerance, and performance.
no they don't, unless they have small budgets. the time to rebuild is far shorter in a 10 than 5, and the read/write is waaaayyyy faster because the parity bit doesn't have to exists on every drive, but anyway that ot
raid 5 is such ass, noone ever wanted run it, but it provided the best fault tolerance for a while, that time is over
Putting SSDs in RAID is pointless for general consumer use. A single good SSD is so fast that the speed boost you might get from RAID doesn't matter, and is arguably outweighed by the potential problems that RAID can cause (in part due to it disabling TRIM), even apart from the cost. If reliability is the issue, then just do a daily incremental backup of whatever data you care about to an external USB flash drive or external hard drive (depending on how much data you want to back up).
Comments
Master and Slave?
You're going back to really old days of IDE interfaces there mate.
I don't think any of that matters with the new SATA hard disks, which is all you should be buying now.
What you can do is buy an SSD SATA drive and drop it into your system. Use that for your game installations and use a regular drive for your downloads. Make sure you have Windows 7 as that contains optimisations for SSD drives that help them last longer and prevents them from slowing down over time. I would also recommend that you redo your system and put your OS on the SSD drive with a full reinstall of Windows 7. That will give you the greatest benefit. I would also not recommend using a drive less than 128GB for your primary OS drive. Actually 256GB is probably the sweet spot for space.
If you really want to get fancy you can purchase one of the OCZ REVO Drives which are a PCI-E card that you plug into your machine. Your machine will recognise the card as a hard disk.
An SSD is the single upgrade that will have the largest effect on your productivity with your machine. Going from having windows take 1 to 2 minutes to load, to having a useable system in 12 to 15 seconds must be experienced to be believed.
Take a read of this article for more information on upgrading: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-upgrade-hdd-performance,3023.html
i guess the correct term now is called Raiding ^_^
but does having 2 ssds make anymore difference then having 1 is my question ^_^
with quiz's help i built me a nice gaming computer.. but I really didnt think an ssd would make a huge difference from a hdd and I am just getting back into the hardware stuff... So I am kinda well I am out of the game and I have no clue what the new stuff or raiding is all about hahaha
and suggestions on a nice ssd card?
If you're switching from normal hard disk to SSD, I'd suggest buying one SSD first to see how fast it is, and then deciding if you need extra speed of using multiple in RAID.
You could read Tom's Hardware's recommendations about an SSD and choose one of them http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-review-benchmark,3115.html
Sequential penalty of a ssd? That's so 2009!
Todays SSDs have a sequential read/write speed of around 500mb/s. HDD's have less than half the speed even doing sequential read/writes.
looking at theses reviews on most of the ssds hards I have read on... and ppls horrors stories.. makes me kinda of scared to even buy one haha
SSD's are already very parallel - all the chips on the device (joined via channels) can be accessed independently by the controller, essentially acting as a large RAID 0 device with 6-8-10-however many channels the SSD has.
Yes, putting SSDs in RAID 0, and to a lesser extent 5, will help with their sequential times, but they are already very very fast.
One very large drawback to that, is that very few RAID controllers will support TRIM, which maintains the SSD's speed over time.
Here's a few benchmarks.
http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/forum/hardware-canucks-reviews/51455-intel-520-240gb-ssd-raid-0-performance-review-11.html
Redudant Array of Inexpsive Disks, RAID(oxymoron if there ever was one)
unless your are running 3 or more drives RAID 0 is at max a %20 increase over running 2 independant disks, and if one drive fails you lose the data on both drives.
just plug then in and listen to gel, then dont worry about a thing every little thing is gonna be alright
edit:
noone runs raid 5 its all 0+1 or 1+0
Not true - lots of people run RAID 5. It's not typical in gaming computers though - but neither is RAID 10 - mostly because people don't want to run 3/4+ HD's in their system. But for places that need speed and reliability, RAID 5 is at least as common as RAID 10, if not more-so. It strikes an excellent balance between available capacity, fault tolerance, and performance.
no they don't, unless they have small budgets. the time to rebuild is far shorter in a 10 than 5, and the read/write is waaaayyyy faster because the parity bit doesn't have to exists on every drive, but anyway that ot
raid 5 is such ass, noone ever wanted run it, but it provided the best fault tolerance for a while, that time is over
If you say so dude. There are a lot of advantages to RAID 10, but that doesn't mean RAID 5 simply went away, or doesn't have advantages of it's own.
p.s.
RAID 5 has faster reads than RAID 10, btw. I'll even include a link to support my preposterous statement:
http://www.kendalvandyke.com/2009/02/disk-performance-hands-on-part-5-raid.html
Putting SSDs in RAID is pointless for general consumer use. A single good SSD is so fast that the speed boost you might get from RAID doesn't matter, and is arguably outweighed by the potential problems that RAID can cause (in part due to it disabling TRIM), even apart from the cost. If reliability is the issue, then just do a daily incremental backup of whatever data you care about to an external USB flash drive or external hard drive (depending on how much data you want to back up).