More Scratch Disk Madness

P
Posted By
p645n
Aug 28, 2004
Views
344
Replies
4
Status
Closed
I’ve just read over about 100 previous posts on scratch disks but I’m still not sure I have it right — here goes:

I’m presently awash in 300 to 500 meg files (scans of 6×9 color negs). I’m running an AMD 1900+ CPU, 1.5 gigs RAM. I have a 10,000 rpm SATA drive as my main drive. A SATA 200 gig 7200 as my scratch disk and storage is on the second channel of my PCI SATA card.

Things are sloooow — great with 30 meg files but sloooow with the 300 meg brethren.

I believe that big files like mine are very scratch disk dependant.

And so my question: If I buy another 10,000 rpm drive solely for a scratch disk will it speed up my system noticeably?

Or will I notice much of an improvement if I RAID 0 the two 10,000 rpm drives and use keep using the 200 gig drive for a scratch disk?

Suggestions are really appreciated — thanks jim
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FN
Fred_Nirque
Aug 28, 2004
Seems to me you’d be better using the 2 10K’s as RAID 0 for your scratch disk and files, and the 7200 for the OS & paging.

You will notice a speed improvement with RAID regardless (read/writes should be at least double the speed of an un-RAIDed drive), but use it for the most intensive read/writes (such as scratch) to get the full benefit.

If it doesn’t help enough, you will at least have the basics for a decent upgrade.

Fred.
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Aug 28, 2004
Having the scratch file on two unraided drives might be worth trying too! I’d like to hear from Mark Hamburg, Marc Pawlinger, Scott Byer or Chris Cox about this!
Y
YrbkMgr
Aug 28, 2004
If what Fred says is true,

read/writes should be at least double the speed of an un-RAIDed drive)

Then you will get the MOST benefit.

But after re-reading your specs and the issue of 300meg files and all, I wouldn’t be overly optimistic that you will ever make things "zippy".

I know it must be driving you crazy, but man, you’re working with some LARGE files. I’m not sure how much you could expect.

Peace,
Tony
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Aug 31, 2004
"read/writes should be at least double the speed of an un-RAIDed drive" THe STR is almost doubled, but STR is not everything: data queuing and reordering, access time, etc… do not benefit from Raid0
Do NOT expect a two fold increase in speed with Raid0 remember that theory and real world are very different, especially in computing!

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