Windows A question of disks, pagefiles and RAID :)

Im always up for optimising system performance and stability in anyway I can.

Im looking towards my hard disks now, I run two Seagate Barracuda's (which I consider to be brillianr drives all round) one is a 160Gb and the other a 80Gb. Both off my A7N8X-Delux mobo.

Now lately ive seen a lot of talk about putting your system on the smaller one and having everything else non windows and core on another storage drive, and also cranking the pagefile up to a few gig. What is the best way for access time and efficient use of space??

Now also my board is able to do the ol' RAID. Its something ive never looked into but it sounds as though its fast? If it cuts into my FarCry loads and/or DVDR cutting and pasting its welcome!

Any info/tuts on either would be great as I really wanna work the best out of the drives which are allready thumping away. I fancy a format next week anyhow so thats no prob if its required for RAID.

Anyone use RAID on their day-in day-out rig? Just with the amount of time effort and cooling i spend on cranking the CPU and RAM it seems silly to let the HDD lag.

deano.

 

Choosing a RAID won't gain you any speed by may help with fault tolerance (depending on the RAID level). The big however is if your motherboard/RAID controller has cache memory. If you have a decent cache, the performance would be increased. Personally I always use the smaller drive for the system drive and put the page file on the other drive. I also like to put the drives on separate channels unless they need to share with a slower device like a DVD or CD. I can’t remember the formula for the size of the page file, but I think it is something like 3 times the memory. Anything more is really a waste. It’s hard to remember since I usually work on Citrix boxes and the page file info is totally different.

Hope I helped a little.