pouët.net

It's a bit frustrating to see that number. 5,9 just doesn't fit with all those other 7,x ratings.

And it's noticeable. My HDD(s) is/are definitely the bottleneck in my computer. I do lots of coding/compiling. My CPU yawns while my HD struggles.

I've got a two 7200rpm SATA-II drives, one 240GB and one 120GB, they both form a RAID0 volume of 240GB.
Before I formed the RAID0 volume, I had my fastest drive as system drive, and the rating was 5,5.

My question is, can it get any better without buying new disks? And if I should get new disks, what do you suggest? I don't mind size, I want it fast, reliable and cheap (no SSDs). It's also not catastrophic if a drive fails, since I backup my data on a server with two 600GB HDs forming a RAID1 volume.

a new (and fast) 500gb hdd (like samsung spinpoint) cost less than 50€...
otherwise if its not for storage raptor hdd are also know for having good performance (1000RPM, short seek time, but they are noisy)

dont understand why you dont want ssd... price really drop recently (and that will continue). you can find a decent one for 64gb. they are the future that will replace our old mechanical and noisy hdd, just like dvd replace the old vhs tapes...

also, things you can do without buying new hardware :

- if you have a lot of ram (2gb- 4gb) desactivate pagination file, this will reduce useless hdd read write operations (windows use pagination file even if there is plenty of ram available)

- defrag your hard drive with a good hdd defragmenter (like O&O defrag). sorting files by name or by last access can help improve performance.

- move static/big files (like data) on the slowest hard drive (which should be the biggest one) and system files on the fastest one (but i bet you already know this).

- if you are mostly compiling you should try this :
* create a ram harddrive
* configure your compiler so all temporary files, file resulting compilation and so will go ram drive. not sure it will really boost performance but it might help. if there is a power cut everything on that drive is lost :(

also : in some cases having a raid0 on old harddrives can be slower than a newer hdd with no raid at all...

I bought an Intel X25-M (G2) 80GB drive last autumn, replacing my WD 7.200 500GB (don't remember which model) as system drive.

The difference was astounding. I now boot up twice as fast, and can instantly start using the computer, not having to wait till after all startup programs have loaded. The system feels alot more responsive and everything just takes less time.

I don't do any programming myself, so can't say how that will work for you, but i guess if there's alot of files being fetched during compilation you'll get a nice speed boost.

With SSD there's also the capacity to think about. How much space you need for work. After installing win7 and the software i use i had about 40-50GB left which i use for current projects. The rest of the data (archived projects, music, videos etc.) are on standard 1/2TB mechanical drives.

There are now some very cheap 'budget' SSDs too - not as fast as the expensive ones, and not that big, but they should be much faster for a boot/system/apps disk still for under €100.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26enkCzkJHQ ;)

Never fill hard drives beyond 40% of capacity if you want the best possible transfer rates. (This is not necessary for SSDs.)

In your case, use only the first 96 GB of your volume and make sure the files are not fragmented.

If you want more, a good starting point would be a single 1TB or 1.5TB drive. These are cheap and fast (regarding the block transfer rate). For a RAID0 I recommend that you use a decent controller, not a cheapo motherboard controller (depends on the mobo chipset).

Mind that the 1.5TB recommendation is because you want speed (transfer rate). The higher capacity is just a bonus.

read/write burst speed != seek time

when windows is starting or you are compiling the system is accessing lots of small files randomly on the disk, not sure having big transfer rates help

Because the first 40% of the drive are the fastest? link me beautiful.

What about those max. 10k writes for the flash memory inside a SSD, does it get painfully slow after that? Can it be resetted to optimal speed after that?

@Gargaj: Nice. If I had the budget...

In SI in old good Norton Commander there was a comparison. But my PC never got higher than their best configuration, e.g. I had tried in a Pentium 2 with faster HD than there, it got more in CPU and HD comparisons separately, but in the final screen compared to their computer with both these configurations the bar was slightly lower always. I don't know why. Maybe because they have computers that can beat my computer no matter what.

Just an irrelevant thing I remembered.

Intel X25-M G2 160GB in my work pc and to put it in one word: whoaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa. Or to state an example: OpenOffice.org startup time: less than one fucking second. :)

kb: seconded. I have SSDs in my main PC now and I'm never going back to regular drives.

what's the lifetime on SSD's nowadays anyway?

The outer partitions of the disk are faster than the inner partitions. The disk is supposed to fill from the outer partitions to the inner ones. 40% are a rule of thumb for still ok performance (regarding block transfer rate), but of course using only 25% is even faster. A smaller number also limits the maximum r/w head travel, so access time is also improved.

Heck, if the access time counts, just go for a SSD!

Personally, I use 300GB Velociraptors because I trust them more (quick enterprise drive with SATA2).

just buy a mac.

Oktagon 508 (SCSI-2) w/ Quantum LPS 105 and no more worries :) Cheers!

Someone(s) is clearly missing the point here...
I'll see if there are some accessible SDDs out there. BTW I'm also interested on their liftime, could anybody answer gargaj's question?

Intel are specifing a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) of 1.2M hours (http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/mainstream/322296.pdf) and a life expectancy of >5 years if you write 20GB per day (!), so you really shouldn't worry. Another advantage is that failure only means that data can't be written anymore and the drive becomes read only instead of breaking completely.

Speaking of SSDs in general, if you really want top performance there's only two top players at the moment (performance as well as reliabilitys wise): Intel and a small company called Indilinx who license their controllers to other companies. Intel SSDs are optimized for maximum random access throughput (80MB/sec sustained with random 4K reads or writes(!)) and can do an amount of IOPS that's at the "yeah, go try keeping me busy" level but are a bit "slow" when it comes to sequential writes. The Indilinx drives (eg. OCZ Vertex) completely blow away everything else when it comes to sequential performance but "suck" a bit with random access.

Mind that though I used the word "slow" or "suck" they are in big sarcasm quotes because they're still orders of magnitude faster than platter based HDs :) And honestly, even the JMicron based SSD in my netbook (that really stinks in comparison to abovementioned products) is faster than the HD in my desktop PC.

See for example http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3747 to be convinced that there are currently in fact more than two top players in terms of pure performance - SandForce-based drives is where the hype is at the moment. However their reliability are as of yet unproven, which is not the case for the drives which kebby mentions.

I'll get an SSD when they're actually decently priced, i.e. 250GB for under 100 euro or so.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs and voila
no more performance issues ...
i'm wondering which score vista/7 will give you

Given that 24 SSDs with 200MB read/sec should give you a maximum throughput of 4.8GB/sec (or let's say 4 with some redundancy) the 2GB/sec the video is showing just prove one thing: RAID controllers are too goddamn slow to cope with SSDs :)

There are also PCIe SSDs. They are way faster than SATA. Does anyone know if you can combine them to form a RAID?

+1 SSD. intel 80gb here.. best buy in a long time performance wize.