Ok a question to ponder. Currently im am running a WD Raptor 36gb on my machine. DFI lanparty nf4 SLI-DR, AMD 3800X2, XFX 7800gtx, 1gb OCZ pc4000, X-Fi Plat. When i bought the Raptor, i thought it would be fast. But really i notice no difference between it and a IDE/SATA 7200rpm drive. I have a Adaptec 19160 single channel U160 card lying around. How much of a performance difference would i see if i dropped in a MAU 15k on this sucker? I want this snappy, you can tell the HD just kills the perforamce on this machine. Also X-Fi plat can be taken out cuz it sucks if that would kill the SCSI performance. Any thoughts on this are greatly appreciated.
Where are you seeing slowdown? A raptor shouldnt be too terribly much faster, but the 15k drive will be faster. However, a second gig of RAM would probably yield more useful performance improvements.
I'd agree. It also depends on the interface of the SCSI card - you'll totally bog down a PCI bus, especially if you've got a gigabit LAN (as so many are) on there as well. I think you'll notice seek times a bit better, as you would expect, but I really wouldn't expect load times and whatnot to decrease by a whole lot.
You could also buy a gigabyte I-Ram. http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2480 If you have ram lying around or deep pockets, a need for speed and the patience to actually find one on sale, it can be truely amazing. Edit: or you could just get one on ebay... http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...r=1&from=R8&satitle=gigabyte+i-ram&category0=
you will see a difference between the raptor and the MAU as the 36GB raptor isn't really faster than new 7200 drives, but the newest raptors (the WD1500ADFD and WD740ADFD) are faster still than the MAU on the dektop (im getting rid of my MAU when the 74GB one becomes availible in this neck of the woods) The PCI bus, while theoretically a bottleneck, really isn't in practise provided youre not running a large array. My burst rate is limited to around 120MB/sec, the sustained transfer and IOps are unaffected.
alright guys that seems like a pretty good starting point. thanks for the pointers. ill probably just hit up newegg for a duel shannel 2gb kit and a 74gb ratpor and see how that goes. but of course the i-ram does like inviting ;-)
make sure its a WD740ADFD and not a WD740GD, newegg should be getting the new ones (ADFD) pretty soon, theres already a few places that have them in stock
