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Hard drive setup

Post Date: 2007-09-25
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Brandon View Drop Down
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  Quote Brandon Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Topic: Hard drive setup
    Posted: 25 Sep 2007 at 7:57pm

If I have a 74G Raptor HD and a 400 G sata drive would there be any benifits if I were to install my games on the 400 G drive? Its the setup I ordered on recommendation of the sales guy. I just thought about it later what the point would be to have the highspeed drive if I dont install games on it. Or is it good for the OS to be running on the highspeed drive? Bottom line, will I need to install my games on the raptor to get the benifits? 
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Jeff View Drop Down
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Posts: 68 		  Quote Jeff Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 25 Sep 2007 at 9:47pm
Yeah, put the games on the Raptor for the faster load times, and use the 400G for storage.
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Bill the Cat View Drop Down
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Posts: 1150 		  Quote Bill the Cat Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 25 Sep 2007 at 11:32pm
I've also got a Raptor/ and a 7200 RPM SATA drive. I don't know for sure that it makes sense, but I put both XP and my games on the Raptor. I use the SATA drive only for data; JPGs, MP3s, video files. My guess is that when I'm playing a game, the OS is fairly dormant at least as far as disk activity goes.
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Alex View Drop Down
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Posts: 16314 		  Quote Alex Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 2:03am
Actually, the person you spoke with at Digital Storm is right. You don't want to install your games on a Raptor drive. You won't get a boost in your FPS, or less lag with a faster drive. All that's going to do is speed up your loading times and saving times, which, would be by a few seconds.
 
It is better to install your OS on the Raptor because then you can allow Windows to use the speed of the Raptor to load applications, to access the page file, and do random tasks. Your system will seem much more zippy.
 
Plus, going with a 74GB Raptor for your OS will mean less Windows Defrag times. Your data will be much more organized.
 
Originally posted by Brandon

If I have a 74G Raptor HD and a 400 G sata drive would there be any benifits if I were to install my games on the 400 G drive? Its the setup I ordered on recommendation of the sales guy. I just thought about it later what the point would be to have the highspeed drive if I dont install games on it. Or is it good for the OS to be running on the highspeed drive? Bottom line, will I need to install my games on the raptor to get the benifits? 
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Bill the Cat View Drop Down
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Posts: 1150 		  Quote Bill the Cat Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 8:22am
I don't know if the speed increase is due to faster decompression of the data by the 3 GHz CPU or the Raptor's thru put, but I think playing off the Raptor is worth while, if you can do it.
 
There are games where disk I/O times can make a big difference. "Oblivion" and "Vampire: The Masquerade" are two good examples. Both of these games regularly load environments as you move around.
 
The thing that impressed me the most about Oblivion on my new machine is that I go from the desktop to playing the game in literally 15 seconds! It used to take forever. Moving in and out of buildings and towns requires only a couple of seconds. Moving around outside, there's no pause as the game loads a new area. It's amazing.
 
The Masquerade is basically the same deal. Based on the HL2 engine, it used to take for ever to move from indoor to outdoor levels. Now it's very quick.
 
I had the Raptor partitioned in half so XP and general applications on C: don't get mixed up with the game files on D:
 
I guess the Raptor's big advantage is supposed to be in doing lots of random reads as opposed to big block copies of data, but it sure seems to make a difference.
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thecomplex View Drop Down
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Posts: 230 		  Quote thecomplex Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 9:28am
I'm getting two 150GB Raptors on my rig, but now I have to decide where to put my stuff. I do a lot of music composition, audio recording/editing on the PC, and some of the plugins and file libraries use up a lot of resource. So.. do I:

1) Leave the OS on one Raptor and put the games, personal files, and audio editing stuff on the other?
2) Put the OS and games on one, and audio editing stuff on the other?

etc..

It seems like a waste to just have the OS running off of a 150GB hard drive, doesn't it?

(I will probably get a large (maybe 1TB) external drive for my music collection - and sit down with boxes and boxes of CDs and finally make a badass backed up collection of stuff).

Chris
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.52GHz
4GB DDR2 Corsair 1066MHz Dominator
(2) 150GB WD Raptor (10K RPM)
(1) 120GB Maxtor (7200RPM)
nVidia GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
Vista Home Premium 64
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Bill the Cat View Drop Down
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Posts: 1150 		  Quote Bill the Cat Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 9:49am
You can ask DSO to partition the primary Raptor into a boot/system partition and data partition. I split mine roughly 50/100. 50 Gig goes a long way, if you're not loading it up with data and games at 5 to 6 Gig a pop.
 
It's mind boggling how big a Terabyte is. Thats 1,600 CDs stored in uncompressed WAV format! I was going to get two 500 Gig internal drives, but realized that either the computer or I won't live long enough to use that much space.
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thecomplex View Drop Down
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Posts: 230 		  Quote thecomplex Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 10:23am
Bill,

Thanks - I'm actually thinking of having the system dual-booted in Vista63 and XP32 - emailed them to get a feel for how much and how long it would take to do it. In that case I would probably have the first Raptor partitioned in two, with both OSs on it, and the other for my games and audio stuff.

It's true, a terabyte is a ton of space. However, say I have a 16-track drumset recording that I want to save - that's sixteen huge uncompressed files in one. It eats up a lot of space quick.

One other option is my existing hard drive (I think it's about 300GB, which I could make do with Smile). My old iBuyPower died and I haven't been able to fix it, but the hard drive seems to be OK. I need to get it backed up anyway as I have tons of family photos and recordings that I need to get off it. Can I install this in the DS rig I'm getting, copy my important files, and clear out the drive to use it for storage? I'm pretty sure it is an IDE drive though - will that cause any problems?

Chris

PS - Brandon I just realized that I totally hijacked your thread - sorry!


Edited by thecomplex - 26 Sep 2007 at 10:25am
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 @ 3.52GHz
4GB DDR2 Corsair 1066MHz Dominator
(2) 150GB WD Raptor (10K RPM)
(1) 120GB Maxtor (7200RPM)
nVidia GeForce 8800GTX 768MB
Vista Home Premium 64
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Brandon View Drop Down
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  Quote Brandon Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 1:15pm
Not A problem Chris as this is all useul information from all involved. I do a lil audio playing to, I use a program called reason to play around with..............
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commast View Drop Down
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  Quote commast Quote  Post ReplyReply bullet Posted: 26 Sep 2007 at 7:39pm
A bigger HDD is always nice to have and HDD is cheap enough. My DS system has 2 250GB HDD in RAID 0 and it won't be long before it's all filled up. I've already use about 50 GB already Shocked !!! and I haven't install all of my software yet. Quite a few of that space i think is for the System restore, i have to run Treesize Pro later on to find out what's taking up so much space.
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