What HD would be better for gaming?

[nucl3arboNg]

maxtor ata133 8.5 ms 60gb fbd 2mb cache, or WD 80gb ata100 9ms 8mb cache? does the difference between ata100 and 133 make a hit on performance?

[nucl3arboNg]

i say this because from my understanding gaming perfomance won't improve from using raid 0, and I could just save my money for other things like my water cooling .

[SteveI]

For 3d gaming, the performance will not come from faster HDDs.. Virtually all the performance will come from GPU, CPU, and Mem... roughly in that order.

HDD performance in games will only be noticable... when switching scenes, loading new maps... stuff like that.

BTW... Even Maxtor 133s don't seem to benefit from running 133. I tried running ATA100 with mine, and the benchmarks were almost identical. I'm very happy with my maxtors... they seem to perform very well. All 4 of them are 2mb cache, but bench much better than ATA100 8mb cache models.

[nucl3arboNg]

what i'm thinking now is going with a maxtor 80gb ata133 8mb drive. will that be as fast in gaming as using a raid 0 set-up?

[mookydooky]

Originally posted by nucl3arboNg
what i'm thinking now is going with a maxtor 80gb ata133 8mb drive. will that be as fast in gaming as using a raid 0 set-up?

The Maxtor 80GB ATA133 only has a 2MB cache. It will NOT be as fast as RAID 0. When they say drives are ATA133, that means 133MB/Sec is the max burst speed of the drive. Sustained transfer rate however, is something completely different. RAID 0 will pretty much double the sustained transfer rate over a single drive. More important than ATA100 or ATA133 is rotational speed. Get a 7200 RPM drive for best performance. If cost is no object and you want serious sustained speed, get a SCSI 10,000 RPM drive and RAID 0 it.

[nucl3arboNg]

yes mooky there is 8mb maxtor drives....http://www.maxstore.com/product.asp?sku=2242896
and i was told that raid 0 will not make much difference in gaming.

[nucl3arboNg]

and money is not that easy to come-by for me it's just getting this drive is cheaper then a drive+raid card.

[robbie]

Originally posted by SteveI

BTW... Even Maxtor 133s don't seem to benefit from running 133. I tried running ATA100 with mine, and the benchmarks were almost identical. .

Does your board support ata133???


SteveI is right though, the only improvement that you'll see if the maps loading quicker with games.

Does your MB support ata133 nucl3arboNg??
Rob

[nucl3arboNg]

yes my board does support ata133, and my new board does also. So do i get another maxtor 40gb ata133 8.5ms 2mb and go raid 0 with my exsisting maxtor 40gb, or do i get the maxtor 80gb ata133 9ms 8mb and pass the 40gb down?

[SteveI]

Robbie,
Yes, most of mine do. As mooky put so well tho, ATA133 is the theoretical max transfer rate (burst rate).. No ATA drive can sustain that. So every once in a blue moon for a sec, data transfers at that rate.... If the drive is on an ATA100 controller, it just gets capped there at ATA100.. but the rest of the time it is performing at its max anyway, so the overall performance is negligible. That's not to say Maxtors are bad.. just the opposite. On an ATA100 controller, they are by far the fastest 2mb cache drives around, and the most tolerant of oc'd PCI bus .

nucl3arboNg,
I think you missed our point... To get gaming performance... no HDD will make a real difference. For overall disk access speed with a single drive, an ATA133 8mb cache drive is good, but not as fast as raid... If you are looking for a new mobo, a raid mobo would be economical. Otherwise, any 7200rpm drive would suffice.

[Holst]

Originally posted by nucl3arboNg
yes my board does support ata133, and my new board does also. So do i get another maxtor 40gb ata133 8.5ms 2mb and go raid 0 with my exsisting maxtor 40gb, or do i get the maxtor 80gb ata133 9ms 8mb and pass the 40gb down?

Going raid 0 will be the "better option"

The only disadvantage will be that raid 0 is often less safe than a single drive, if you have a collapsed array you loose everything.

Raid 0 will be a fair ammount faster (boot and load times, plus windows will "feel" faster" but its more volatile.

[nucl3arboNg]

what i plan on doing is running 2 computers on a network through a router. I will use the HD on the other computer to back up all the important stuff on the raid array. Does this sound like a good plan? If so that's what i'm gonna do. Also if i do set up my raid ie...do clean install etc..will i have to do it again if i switch hardware? My giga mobo now has onboard raid, and the Epox i'm getting doesn't so i'll be using a pci card. Will i have to set it up all over again?

[Holst]

If your changing motherboard you will have to reinstall windows.

But if your using a PCI raid card you "probably" wont have to build a new array when swapping mobo, so you wont loose everything.
If your changing controller then you might have to rebuild the array (start over)
Id stick with the PCI card the entire time if you can (use PCI on the giga board)

Just partition so that you have a seperate partition for your OS, so you can format that when reinstalling.

[nucl3arboNg]

so would making a partition for my games make that faster also? How would you split up 2 40gb HD's? Say with partitions for OS, Games, and whatever else.

[WyrmMaster]

The only real reasons to partition is to make defragging easier, make it easier to backup and reinstall, and to help organize your data.

[SteveI]

Originally posted by WyrmMaster
The only real reasons to partition is to make defragging easier, make it easier to backup and reinstall, and to help organize your data.

Yup, my 2x 60gig raid 0 is running an 8 gig primary boot, and a 100 gig data drive. Doing this doesn't make much of a performance boost, but I've gotten into this habit years ago.... all my important data is easier to reach, backup, and restore if necessary. It's just an organization thing for me.