News RAID on laptops = kick ass gaming rig

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/08/25/raid_laptop_intel_matrix/

 

Wait, so...multiple hdd's in a lappy? Size constraints aren't a problem?

Sorry if this is rather noobish, i don't know much about laptop innards as i can't buy them and tweak them as easily as I can desktops.

 

it just make for a larger laptop but for that type size doesn't matter much as it will not last very long away from a outlet while gaming. Also it goes along with the 17" screens too.

 

i'd carry 300metres of power-cord if i had to, just to have that.

 

Many laptops can take two hard drives - I have a 15" HP NW8000 that has hard drive, DVD combo drive, and a floppy in what HP call the MultiBay. You can remove the floppy and replace with a second hard drive.

If you had a smaller notebook with just hard drive and DVD drive, the latter could be swapped out for the second hard drive, and you could use the DVD drive externally if & when you needed it.

I'm not saying the battery life wouldn't suffer, but it's doable. GigantoR: this story will show you how tiny notebook hard drives are these days: http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2005/08/23/xbox_360_hard_drive/

and possibly some vendors might move to the new 1.8" drives in order to offer RAID...

 

Ah, I knew the drives were smaller but I didn't figure on the larger size required by a gaming machine with a larger display.

 

I remember seeing a laptop that could have three hard drives and two opticals. Musta been a fatass of a laptop, to be frank, but you've got possibilities there.

Honestly I wouldn't want it, just because it's more expensive and lowers battery life. But I wouldn't want a laptop for LAN use at all, because I have a powerhouse desktop I'd happily tote along. Now if it was possible to have something like 5-6 hours battery life and be at the same price point as a non-gaming laptop, I'd be all over it, but I'm too strong of a believer in specialization to ever consider a gaming laptop. "Do it right or don't do it at all".

If you find a laptop with 5 hours of battery life at $999 with RAID0/Matrix RAID of 200+ GBs and the power of high end desktop graphics with a screen that can do 1600x1200 or a widescreen equivalent, let me know because I'm all over it. Chances are... not so good.

 

Question:

What's the diffrence between this and what Alienware are currently offering on their laptops? Imean, they've got 2 diffrent RAID setups available...

 

Personally I would rather see smaller, lighter laptops. Brickputers are not my idea of portable.

Guess it would make a slick LAN rig though

 

I assume theres an optional fork lift truck to transport your new notebook?

 

I don't think that the laptop will be that much heavier. Of course, you may need that fork lift for the battery though....

 

It's already avialable, in clevo laptops, such as the alienware mentioned above.

I've got the Sager version - Pentium4 3 Ghz, Geforce go 6800 ultra, Kicks ass. Can handle Raid, though i've only got one Hdd right now. It;s definitely a brickputer, but it can run any game on the market at near maximum graphics settings.

http://www.pctorque.com/sager-9880-gaming-computers.php
http://www.alienware.com/product_de...sCode=PC-LT-MJ12M-7700-CP&SubCode=SKU-DEFAULT

 

raid in a laptop is stupid when you can have a flash based hard disk which is faster than any laptop disc based raid and uses less power, admitedly it is 16gb... but thats what external drive caddies were made for (keep all your games on it and just copy them over when you want to play)

 

I have found around 7 companys that can build to order this same computer (in a AMD 64 plat). however I cant find one that sells a barebone from the site.
these are awesome laptops, I have access to a couple of them. I plan on picking up a AMD version soon.

TF

 

How, exactly? I've been doing the whole "RAID 0 is useless for games" in many other threads today, so I might as well shove it in this one. RAID 1 for a laptop is rather inneficient, since you'd be cheaper and better just having an Icebox and 3.5" drive to back stuff up to.

As for RAID 0, good for image editing, and yes, no doubt some people will want to do traditionally desktop things on laptops, for style and space reasons these days, but, once more, pointless for almost all games.

 

RAID on laptops = Size + Weight + Heat + Power Consumtion

 

its not just image editing, its great for any situation where you handle a file >8mb (or whatever your cache size is)
i like raid 0, i had a raid 0 array a long time ago, then i moved to a single raptor, i've since gone back to raid 0 because its much faster for my purposes

dunno about gaming laptops tho, at some point they're gonna end up being so huge you might aswell just carry around a shuttle + 17" tft

 

RAID 0 striped on my laptop

http://www.techimo.com/articles/index.pl?photo=149

I followed this and got RAID to work great on my laptop, huge jump in perforamce (I tested using http://www.sisoftware.net/ )

my problem is that if you don't do backups often you might not be able to recover your data on a dynamic drive if you have an OS problem. At least, I wasn't able to get my data back from my dynamic drives when I had an OS problem.

and yes, the battery performance was halved, but I didn't care about that