pauldovi

Going to be doing some upgrading to my system. I will not be touching some of the core components (CPU, motherboard, memory) as I am waiting for Penryn, X38 (Intel motherboard), and DDR3.

However, I am making advancements where they are long overdue.

- Areca ARC-1210 hardware RAID controller.

This RAID controller uses a PCI Express slot and has 256MB of on-board memory. This results in a huge improvement in burst, read, and write speeds. Read the discussion here.

- 4 x Western Digital WD740ADFD Raptors hard drives in RAID0.

This gives me plenty of storage capacity and performance. However, with my current storage capacity being sufficient (74GB Raptor), I almost wonder if I should save money and just go with 36GB Raptors, or even just high end 7200RPM drives.

- PC Power and Cooling 750 Silencer power supply unit.

Powerful powersupply to support the hard drives and bring me safely into Quad core and DX10 graphics.



In consideration:

- Windows Vista Ultimate Upgrade

Pretty sure I am going to wait on this until a major service pack (or similar update) comes out.


- EVGA 8800GTX

May wait to see what is up with the 8900GTX and ATI's offerings. I don't really not anything more powerful than the GTS. And with a GTX, I will need a new waterblock.

In the Future:

Penryn Quad Core

DDR3

Intel X38 motherboard.


What do you think? Any suggestions?

__________________

DanNEBTD

nooo . . then you'd have faster HDD's then me . .

but in all honesty thats the card Im looking at and I dont see any other better way you could go. I do suggest off board sound though and am wondering why thats not in consideration? All your suggestions look spot on and i give

oh and I would go with the 36 gigs . . . my ~140 is just enough for a vista partition and an XP partition with all my backups and large files on my other drives. . . If you have one OS you'd be fine. . . and you put the money saved to a 500 gig or some other large storage to make up the difference. IMO raid performance is only good for the file you actually use. I dont see a point of searching drives twice the size if their filled with files i rarely access.

__________________
XPS M1330: T7500, 4GB, 13.3" LED WXGA, 128 8400 GS, 120GB 5400RPM, 802.11 AGN, 9 cell, Fingerprint, Ultimate x64, 4 Year Accidental Damage/lojack/warranty.
__________________

demoship

I'd do RAID 5 w/ those drives. You'll get approximately the same performance, since the areca card (same one I got) does NOT take a performance hit from RAID 5.

I made a post in the hard drives section detailing some benchmarks from my setup. 4x 250GB drives won't disappoint you, and 4x raptors definately will not disappoint.

pauldovi

Sounds is not important to me. I am whatever the opposite of an audiophile is.

The reason I chose the 74GB is that the larger the capacity of the drive is, the highest the density. The higher the density, the better the performance.

Do you mind outlining the benefits of RAID5?

__________________

demoship

Redundancy. You can have 1 drive fail without losing your data.

It does use up 1 drive's space though for that purpose. Example, you have 4x 74GB drives. you'll get the storage of 3x 74GB drives, and the space of one drive will be used for the parity bit (the parity bits are spread across ALL The drives, but the total space used for those are equal to one drive's space).

And since you're getting a good areca card, there's very little hit to your performance. You will have a tiny hit. You'll only get the write speed of 3 drives, but you'll still get the full read speed of all 4 drives.

However, I tell ppl who use onboard never to use RAID 5, since w/o specialized architecture to calculate the parity (like the areca has), writing performance is absolutely killed w/ onboard RAID 5, not to mention it'll use up a lot of CPU cycles to calculate those parity bits.

pauldovi

I will seriously consider that.

Thanks for the very well thought out and explained synopsis of RAID 5.

__________________

DanNEBTD

EDIT>> I see what your saying. . for some reason I thought the 36 gig was a physically smaller drive. I think I was comparing photos of the internals of a raptor and a regular HD though . . in that case get the 74s

__________________
XPS M1330: T7500, 4GB, 13.3" LED WXGA, 128 8400 GS, 120GB 5400RPM, 802.11 AGN, 9 cell, Fingerprint, Ultimate x64, 4 Year Accidental Damage/lojack/warranty.
__________________

DuckieHo

Do 74GB raptors use two platters while the 36GB uses one? Or did they just use a denser platter? If they used more platters, performance goes down with size due to increased inertia while still keeping the data density.

__________________
WANTED: Socket M Core/Core 2 CPU, SUGO-02 Black, quality 802.11b/g PCI Card
To answer most of your questions: (1) a fridge cannot cool a PC (2) 64-bit OS for over 3.4GB (3) If a PCIe card fits, it will work (4) Resolution, not screen size (5) If you have a question, it is not news (6) Report, not respond to Spam (7) Single/Non-Modular Rail PSUs are NOT better than Multi-Rail/Modular

pauldovi

36 and 74GB = 1 platter, 150 GB = 2 platters.

Look at the performance difference between the 150 and 74:

__________________

demoship

More platters = higher possible data transfer rate. Think about it, the drive can read from 2 platters at once, instead of 1 platter at once. (but the data that's needed has to be on the same spot on both platters, which may or may not be the case)