Best Hard Drive Configuration?

[Nick Piercey]

Hi Everyone,

Can I pick your brains about hard drive configuration?

I’m just in the process of upgrading my system…

The m/b I’ve settled on is the MSI 845PE Max2 R which has a built in Promise raid controller along with P4 2.53/1GB PC2700.

I have at the moment (working at ATA33, in a trusty old Intel 440BX system)
Maxtor 40GB (5400) Boot ATA 66
Maxtor 40GB (7200) Primary Slave ATA 100
Maxtor 40GB (7200) Secondary Master ATA 100
Pioneer DVR 104 Secondary Slave (currently set to UDMA33)
plus SCSI CDR and CDROM.

I’ve also just bought a Maxtor 120GB (8MB cache). ATA 133

I want to get the best out of my new system – primarily so I can add to the “The King is Dead . . . Long Live the King!” thread

At the moment, I’m thinking

Master boot – 40GB (5400)
Primary slave – DVD writer
Secondary Master 120GB (7200)

And to hang the other identical drives on the Raid controller, either individually or in a raid config.

Would I see any speed increase by using one of the 40GB (7200) as my boot drive?

Could there be a problem mixing a 5400 and 7200 rpm drive on the raid?

Is there a perfect combination?

Thanks, in advance.



Regards,



Nick.

[Marshmallowman]

me thinks: use your 120 GB as the OS drive, with 8m cache it is made for that kind of work. Its probably worth having this one as the boot drive.

Use the 2 40GB 7200 in a RAID 0, not the 40G 5400 as it will slow down your stripe set a bit.
I would think that 2x7200 +1x5400 as a 3drive RAID 0 would have a similar speed to 2x7200 RAID0 as a 2 drive raid 0, since the increase you get from 3 to 2 drive would be offset by the bottleneck of the 5400. (thats just guesswork)

A better use for the 40G 5400 as a a nice storage drive for backups and/or MP3's....etc

Not sure where you would put your swap space, Ir would be reasonable to put a permant swap space on the 5400 40G. Do that before you put anything else on the drive so the swap space is placed at the start of the drive, for extra speed..

for me 80G for my OS's and a 2drive (2x40G) RAID0 works very well.

[gt40]

here's some recommendations from matrox with respect to their rtx platforms:

http://forum.matrox.com/cgi-bin/rtx10/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=get_topic;f=24;t=000113

[Nick Piercey]

Thanks, guys...


Appreciated!