Luggage~SPARTA~ Posted April 20, 2014 Share Posted April 20, 2014 Panic and myself have been discussing the merits of different disk configurations, speed versus capacity, eating versus buying computer equipment, you know the sort of thing (mmmm Baked Bean toasties.......) Anyone who is in a relationship may dimly remember being able to make these sorts of decisions, prior to the higher authority taking away all autonomous thought. So I stuck a few different styles into my main machine to see what results I would get, and let crystaldiskmark come and adjudicate. C: older model Samsung 840 - 120GB SSD D: Two Western Digital RE 1TB (7200) drives in a software stripe E: Samsung 1.5TB (7200) F: Current Samsung EVO 840 SSD Even the space of a year has seen a significant improvement between the two SSD's. However for capacity it is not always affordable to place everything on an SSD and you may have to resort to mechanical, and the stripe does also bring major improvement - but buyer beware. The stripe is an unprotected configuration and you should always take appropriate precautions, a regular backup regime is critical in this scenario. Even though the Western Digital drives have a 5 year warranty and a stupid MTBF you should not rely on luck. I have looked at the cost of hardware raid cards, but at the cheaper end of the market you are still only buying a software solution, and to get true hardware raid you are looking to spend somewhere around £200 plus so I ruled that one out for me as a viable approach. Additionally using the software raid(fake raid) on your board locks the drives to a bespoke drive layout so using operating system allows you to move the drives in the future without having to reformat, or losing access to your data. I did some background reading on fake raid some while ago and there was not much difference between the onboard and the OS variants. Most of the checksum/calculation still gets passed to the processor at this level by both systems. I will be interested to see what sorts of speeds others are getting from their mechanical drives. For those still awake, we salute you! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PANiC Posted April 20, 2014 Share Posted April 20, 2014 impressed by E tbh! is F the 1TB SSD? using samsung magician? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Luggage~SPARTA~ Posted April 20, 2014 Author Share Posted April 20, 2014 Yup, with the speed thingy, but bearing in mind the test uses 1000MB it is still a real world indication. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MH6~SPARTA~ Posted April 22, 2014 Share Posted April 22, 2014 Looks good, guess I'm not the only one who splurged and bought a ~1TB SSD. I would however advise against others using RAID 0 (striping), especially on what are in essence data drives. Sure, having a decent backup regime helps negate the risk, but even so I wouldn't chance it. Anything I store on my data drives is usually not something that requires high performance, so speed is a non-issue for me. My current setup, which works very well for my needs, is as follows: 1TB SSD for O/S, programs, and certain games 500GB 10k RPM WD Velociraptor which is pretty much a dedicated Steam drive. 2TB 7.2k WD Black 2TB 7.2k Seagate 2TB External USB 3.0 12GB RAM Drive (6GB/s read/writes = amazing) I'll see if I can post some speeds later. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
PANiC Posted April 22, 2014 Share Posted April 22, 2014 what do yiou stick in the RAM drive? moved from a stripe for my steam drive to a 500gb ssd recently, very pleased Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MH6~SPARTA~ Posted April 22, 2014 Share Posted April 22, 2014 what do yiou stick in the RAM drive? moved from a stripe for my steam drive to a 500gb ssd recently, very pleased Anything I want to either load fast or that needs to access the hard disk frequently. I actually don't have it setup currently since I just reformatted due to a bad RAM stick, but once I get my replacement I'll probably throw some programs on there again. ArmA was one such candidate as putting it on a RAM drive eliminated model and texture pop-in (and subsequent lag) when flying, especially over large cities (as it streams assets from the hard disk on demand). I usually throw whatever game I'm playing a lot on there to shorten load times. Using junctions it only takes about a minute and I don't need to reinstall or anything, just point the original folder at the RAM drive. I'll also usually store temporary files for Chrome and whatnot on there, both so they don't clutter my SSD and so they can be written/read quickly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
custard~SPARTA~ Posted April 22, 2014 Share Posted April 22, 2014 So the bad RAM stick/s you have had (other thread) have they been part of this RAM drive or part of your system RAM just curious? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MH6~SPARTA~ Posted April 23, 2014 Share Posted April 23, 2014 So the bad RAM stick/s you have had (other thread) have they been part of this RAM drive or part of your system RAM just curious? A RAM drive is all software emulated. Basically it allocates a certain amount of RAM (i.e. 12GB out of my total 32GB) and uses it like a physical disk. So it uses the system memory, it does not have its own dedicated RAM (though there are physical devices that do). Windows reads/writes to it like it would any physical drive, but the RAM disk driver redirects it to RAM. And it uses different areas of RAM with each system boot, so it won't be hitting the same sectors constantly or anything. Obviously since you lose any data in RAM on shutdown, the RAM driver also saves the disk state to a physical drive and loads this disk state on boot up, so you will end up needing space equal to the size of your RAM drive on some physical drive (My 12GB disk image is saved to my SSD). My bad RAM stick was due to my overclocking though, not the RAM drive (wasn't even using the RAM drive when it went bad). And it was just one stick out of eight that went bad after 2-3 years. A RAM drive won't hurt the physical hardware any, as it doesn't differentiate between bits, it's all just data to it. Increasing voltages to overclock it however can shorten the lifespan, as I've just experienced. That's why lifetime warranties (Corsair) rock. A RAM drive is probably overkill for a lot of people, but if you want bleeding edge I/O performance, RAM speeds can't be beat. And with the decreasing cost of RAM, there is really no reason not to max it out and make use of that extra space. Past ~8GB, the rest can be used for RAM drives and virtual machines. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
custard~SPARTA~ Posted April 23, 2014 Share Posted April 23, 2014 Thanks for the info bud Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Watchman~SPARTA~ Posted April 23, 2014 Share Posted April 23, 2014 Just out of curiosity, what mobo has 8 ram slots? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
MH6~SPARTA~ Posted April 24, 2014 Share Posted April 24, 2014 Just out of curiosity, what mobo has 8 ram slots? Awesome ones. In my case it's the ASUS Rampage Extreme IV. Very nice board. Expensive but worth every penny. Got an i7 3930K in it overclocked to 5GHz, and custom water cooling system. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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