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So, let me preface this by saying, yes, it involves me playing WOW. Blah blah blah I suck, ect. I get it.
Anyway, as you may know my raided hard drives got wtf pwnt over the winter solstice holidays and I lost all my data. Everything is fine now, and I have successful reinstalled everything important that i need. I have noticed a slowdown in performance however, especially when i play WOW. Now, i know it’s not a latency issue, so i think the choppiness of the game must be due to reduced processing performance. Anyway, i was wondering if any aspect of replacing my 2 newer hard drives with a singles older hard drive could be to blame. Your thoughts? Also, just fyi my comp is a 4 year old Dell xps. with a 3.2 ghz processor.
Bananarchy said:
So, let me preface this by saying, yes, it involves me playing WOW. Blah blah blah I suck, ect. I get it.Anyway, as you may know my raided hard drives got wtf pwnt over the winter solstice holidays and I lost all my data. Everything is fine now, and I have successful reinstalled everything important that i need. I have noticed a slowdown in performance however, especially when i play WOW. Now, i know it’s not a latency issue, so i think the choppiness of the game must be due to reduced processing performance. Anyway, i was wondering if any aspect of replacing my 2 newer hard drives with a singles older hard drive could be to blame. Your thoughts? Also, just fyi my comp is a 4 year old Dell xps. with a 3.2 ghz processor.
Yes. Especially if they used to be in raid 0. But still yes either way.
yeah hard drive performance has increased dramatically over the past few years. Older drives are painfully slow compared to even lowend new drives.
Hmmm, before they died, I had two some-thing-or-other barracuda drives raided together. The “old ones” had a 360gig capacity, Now i just have a single sata drive. Does this seem like the likely culprit? And if so, how i can i relace it with a better faster drive without losing all my data?
Derrick L. said:
Not to brag…butYou’re bragging. Stop.
It sounds like you had a RAID0 stripe with those 2 Seagate Barracuda drives. You will notice a difference when going from any RAID0 stripe to pretty much any single drive setup, to maintain the speed benefit you’d need to get a REALLY fast single drive. There’s not really a whole lot that can be done.
If you have the choice of using a SATA or IDE drive as a primary OS drive, use the SATA every time. Regardless of any other stats on the drive, the SATA will be lightyears faster than any IDE drive.
Bottom line for HDD performance: (my top 5)
1. SATA > IDE.
2. When possible RAID5. You get fast striping and parity all in one super nifty bundle. (Requires 3 drives and you get the space of the smallest drive x2).
3. Defragment often. It keeps big files together and helps the OS queue them in HDD cache.
4. Drives with larger caches are faster
5. More RPMs=much quicker read and write times.
So basically, a Raid5 array of 3 7200 (or more) rpm SATA drives with 16mb or better cache that you frequently defragment will give you about the best performance you are going to see from your drives. My computer scored 5.9 on Windows Experience Index for hard drives. See appropriate thread in Hardware for details.
Kuros said:
Bottom line for HDD performance: (my top 5)1. SATA > IDE.
2. When possible RAID5. You get fast striping and parity all in one super nifty bundle. (Requires 3 drives and you get the space of the smallest drive x2).
3. Defragment often. It keeps big files together and helps the OS queue them in HDD cache.
4. Drives with larger caches are faster
5. More RPMs=much quicker read and write times.
So basically, a Raid5 array of 3 7200 (or more) rpm SATA drives with 16mb or better cache that you frequently defragment will give you about the best performance you are going to see from your drives. My computer scored 5.9 on Windows Experience Index for hard drives. See appropriate thread in Hardware for details.
Hmmm, i’m really just debating building a new computer; Not sure if I could justify quite yet. Still a better video card/dual core/bigger drivers would be nice.
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