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nudone's new pc
nudone:
i've been reading a pc hardware forum and making a few posts to get the opinions on the new pc i'll be putting together within the next week or two.
there are a few questions i'd just like to ask DC members as i believe i'll get a less biased response.
i'm going for the highest spec machine i can afford (£3000, it's only money!!!) which will be taking me into new territory (hopefully).
my main question that seems appropriate to ask is: how good is raid 0 - speed wise, i'm not worried about disk failure and losing the data as i'll be backing things up onto non raid drives.
i wouldn't ask such a daft question as to how quick raid 0 is, but what make me wonder was that a uk computer magazine mentioned that raid 0 wasn't' that big a deal compared with the speed of the latest hard drives (in a non raid 0 configuration). this sounded odd to me but it made me wonder.
i'm looking to get two Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM's and use them in the raid 0 setup. this would then be used for my operating system, games, large programs and video encoding/editing. i'll also have a couple of 250 drives for storage purposes and other video editing.
does this sound like a reasonable setup so far? i would like to dual boot into at least another operating system (maybe have 3 if can get away with it - Carol's setup sounded like a good system when separating operating systems for video, etc)
can i put more than one operating system onto a raid 0 setup? or would i have to use the 'storage' hard drives.
other than that, can i ghost the operating system on a raid 0 (i'll need to back it up for sure as i'm always ruining my operating system).
can i partition the raid 0 drives?
i'm sure these will be quite basic questions - i'm hoping Carol will be able to answer them if no one else can.
anyway, thanks for that so far.
brotherS:
i've been reading a pc hardware forum and making a few posts to get the opinions on the new pc i'll be putting together within the next week or two.
-nudone (December 12, 2005, 08:40 AM)
--- End quote ---
Bad decision IMHO - take your time!
there are a few questions i'd just like to ask DC members as i believe i'll get a less biased response.
i'm going for the highest spec machine i can afford (£3000, it's only money!!!) which will be taking me into new territory (hopefully).
--- End quote ---
:o Especially when you are willing to pay so much for the new PC I'd give it some time!
my main question that seems appropriate to ask is: how good is raid 0 - speed wise, i'm not worried about disk failure and losing the data as i'll be backing things up onto non raid drives.
i wouldn't ask such a daft question as to how quick raid 0 is, but what make me wonder was that a uk computer magazine mentioned that raid 0 wasn't' that big a deal compared with the speed of the latest hard drives (in a non raid 0 configuration). this sounded odd to me but it made me wonder.
i'm looking to get two Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM's and use them in the raid 0 setup. this would then be used for my operating system, games, large programs and video encoding/editing. i'll also have a couple of 250 drives for storage purposes and other video editing.
does this sound like a reasonable setup so far? i would like to dual boot into at least another operating system (maybe have 3 if can get away with it - Carol's setup sounded like a good system when separating operating systems for video, etc)
can i put more than one operating system onto a raid 0 setup? or would i have to use the 'storage' hard drives.
other than that, can i ghost the operating system on a raid 0 (i'll need to back it up for sure as i'm always ruining my operating system).
can i partition the raid 0 drives?
i'm sure these will be quite basic questions - i'm hoping Carol will be able to answer them if no one else can.
anyway, thanks for that so far.
--- End quote ---
RAID is good, be it RAID 0 or RAID 1 or RAID xyz. And yes, AFAIK you can partition the drives.
And - more important than most of the other things IMHO - find yourself someone (or a specialized forum) for good advice on how to get that PC silent! It's good for your ears AND for your health.
:)
Carol Haynes:
RAID 0 is faster if you need raw writing speed. Trouble is that disc access isn't usually the bottleneck it is usually other system operations and application speed.
To give you an idea - when I installed my current system I experimented with the RAID setup. I installed a clean version of Windows 2000 (I didn't have XP at the time) and nothing else. I then ran HD-Tach which is a disk benchmarking utility.
On pure write speed 2 drives in RAID 0 (stripe) ran at about 1.6 times the speed of the same drives run as standard IDE drives.
You can acheive a little faster but the theoretical maximaum of double speed isn't reachable because the RAID system iteslef has system overheads.
If you have more drives in the array you can theoretically acheive faster times, so 4 x 60Gb drives in a RAID 0 array should theoretically be much faster than 2 x 120Gb drives.
This is all assuming a hardware RAID system (not a software RAID which have less benefits).
This is great if you want to do things like video editing which needs fast writing, but really doesn't make much difference if you are simply installing Windows on the array.
If you use RAID 1 (mirroring) you won't see any speed improvement, in fact you may find the speed degraded slightly.
I haven't used SATA based interfaces yet but I'd guess the speed increase in SATA and the capacity and speed of new drives would make RAID pretty much redundant as a technology unless you really need the extra speed and set up a SATA based array.
As for partitioning etc. you can do pretty much the same with a RAID 0 array as a standard disc - ie. partition it and install multiboot operating systems etc. As far as the computer you are using is concerned the array is a single drive.
A couple of other cautions - not all RAID interfaces are supported by Linux (if you want to use Linux) - at least not in a trivial setup manner.
Also I found that a combination of RAID arrays and standard drives in the same system have interesting effects on Windows when it tries to install. I found that even if RAID is set as the default boot device in the BIOS Windows still made its own assumptions about which should be the C drive. The way I got around this when I used to run Windows on the RAID array was to unplug the other drives during installation.
Nowadays I still use RAID 0 but just as a massive hard disk for writing video data quickly.
Good luck with the build ... I can see one day soon I am going to have to start upgrading again, but I think this time I will do it in a slow, piecemeal sort of fashion rather than spending a huge amount of money in one go.
nudone:
thank you brotherS and Carol.
i'm still in the position that i'm not sure what to go for. the new system is going to be based around an Asus a8n deluxe or premium motherboard with sata drives - sata II drives if the raid 0 isn't going to be used.
to be precise i'm looking at:
motherboard: Asus a8n nForce4 SLi deluxe (or premium)
cpu: AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4800+
ram: Corsair 2GB DDR XMS3500LL Pro TwinX
graphics: XFX GeForce 7800GT Extreme Edition 256MB GDDR3
case: Antec P180 SPCR (the black one)
power supply: Seasonic S12 600W Silent ATX 2.0
sound card: Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi Fatal1ty FPS Edition
some bits may change - i'm still undecided on whether to go straight into water-cooling.
regarding the hard drive setup i was looking at:
two of these - Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA 8MB in a raid 0 setup. the idea behind this being that 10,000 with raid 0 is about as fast as i'll get (without scsi).
i would also be using two Samsung SpinPoint P SP2504C 250GB SATA-II as the storage drives.
the question really is, shall i just stick with the samsung sata II drives (this was my original plan) and scrap the raid 0 idea.
raid 1 and other configurations aren't really what i'm after - it's just the speed freak machine i was after.
i will be video editing in Adobe Premiere and encoding in other programs as well but as i'm used to doing this on a amd xp2200 machine i think any new piece of hardware is going to seem fast to me. hence my uncertainty about raid 0.
Carol has certainly given me something to ponder on regarding the raid 0 array - maybe i should get three or four Western Digital Raptors. the price is something i could just about swallow if i'm going to see an incredible performance increase.
as for the hardware or software raid management - you know, i didn't even realise this. i shall have to investigate - if the Asus motherboard doesn't have hardware raid management then i guess it's not worth going the raid way.
good point about the installation process with raid - if i get that far i'll definately disconnect the other drives first.
sorry that this is getting so geeky.
this raid business is pretty much the final thing i need to work out then i can start buying.
anymore advice would be greatly appreciated.
(i'm trying to make this new machine as silent as possible - raptor drives aren't going to be good for this so i'm looking at using cases around them. all other components will be cooled with 120mm fans or passive heatsinks or whatever i can get that is meant to be near silent. water-cooling would probably make more sense for this.)
brotherS:
some bits may change - i'm still undecided on whether to go straight into water-cooling.
[...]
(i'm trying to make this new machine as silent as possible - raptor drives aren't going to be good for this so i'm looking at using cases around them. all other components will be cooled with 120mm fans or passive heatsinks or whatever i can get that is meant to be near silent. water-cooling would probably make more sense for this.)
-nudone (December 12, 2005, 09:54 AM)
--- End quote ---
Water-cooling is not necessary if you get good regular cooling components - and btw, I wouldn't want water in my PC at any cost :D
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