Screamin' terard computer

v8440

v8440

Well-known member
I got my new machine up last night, and got all the updates and patches installed today. Raid 0 makes quite a difference in boot and app loading times! I have the screaming blithering idiot of video cards (8800 ultra), so it rips through some video benchmarks as well. So far, it has posted a little over 11,000 on 3dmark06. That card makes far more heat than the cpu! I actually feel a warm breeze coming from it when it's idle, just showing the desktop.

I've started overclocking both the video card and the memory/cpu, but I haven't figured out exactly how far I can push everything yet. The core 2 duos are good enough overclockers that I've got almost a 50% overclock out of it without much effort at all. I think with some fine tuning and tweaking that I should be able to get over 3 ghz out of it-stock speed is 1.86 ghz.
 
giowest said:
K, I'm outa here:huh:
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Raid means redundant array of independant disks. In English, it means you take two or more disks and link them together in such a way as to speed up disk performance, provide protection against disk failure by mirroring data across several of them, or some combination of the above. Raid 0 is the fastest setup and the most dangerous. What that does is take your data and write it on two or more disks at once, but it doesn't duplicate (mirror) it. It writes part of it to one disk, then the next part to another, and so on. That gives you the transfer rate of the disks added together. It also means that each disk has a unique part of your data, so if any disk in a raid 0 setup fails, your data is gone. I'll be backing it up to a raid 1 setup periodically, which provides better reliability than one disk where raid 0 provides worse. This will give me the speed benefits of raid 0 with very limited exposure to data loss if a drive fails, since the only stuff I'll lose is whatever was done since the last backup.
 
last comp i built had 4 40GB drives all striped in a 160 GB array. I had planned on splitting a 250GB into 160gb and 90GB partitions. The 160GB partition was going to be for ghosting the RAID array over from time to time. Best of both worlds... till it got a nasty voltage spike. :(
 
gomopar440 said:
last comp i built had 4 40GB drives all striped in a 160 GB array. I had planned on splitting a 250GB into 160gb and 90GB partitions. The 160GB partition was going to be for ghosting the RAID array over from time to time. Best of both worlds... till it got a nasty voltage spike. :(
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ZAP-POOOOOF- ZZZZZ- SPLOOK-- PSSSSsss- BLINK- ZAP-WHOLLY MOTHER OF PEARL LOOK AT ALL THE GREY SMOKE-ZIP---BLINK-ZWING- LITES OUT AND SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSssssssssssss-- blaahh- dead......wow what happened? looking at melted plastic as it runs off of the desk- drip-drip-drip-... then says out loud --DID I DO THAT?[smilie=f:[smilie=f::bwuhaha:
 
gomopar440 said:
last comp i built had 4 40GB drives all striped in a 160 GB array. I had planned on splitting a 250GB into 160gb and 90GB partitions. The 160GB partition was going to be for ghosting the RAID array over from time to time. Best of both worlds... till it got a nasty voltage spike. :(
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Ah, that sucks. I'd shit a brick if that happened to this-the videocard alone was $600. I know it makes absolutely no sense from a financial standpoint to spend that much on a videocard, but my old machine lasted years. I expect this one to do that also, plus I just wanted it.

What I did with this is take two 320 GB drives create a 125 GB raid 0 array, thereby using only the fastest part of the disks for the raid 0, the part near the edge of the platters. Then I made a raid 1 array out of the remaining space on the disks. Yes, I said that right-with intel matrix raid you can create two arrays on the SAME DISKS. I don't believe you can do that with any other raid setup. Using only the first part of the disks gives better sustained transfer rates because the outer part of the platters is passing the heads at a higher velocity than the inner does. Doing this also improves random seek response times because by not using all of the disk, you're limiting the lateral movement the heads must make to access anything on that array. Then you can use the rest of the disks for something else, such as a raid 1 array to back everything up off the raid 0 array.

What I plan to do is get two more of these disks in fairly short order and redo everything. That'll give me a 4 disk raid 0 array-it should REALLY have some stupid sustained transfer rates. With 4 disks in the array, I can afford to use only 1/2 the amount of each one for the raid 0 that I am now, further improving the transfer rates while still yielding the same amount of size. The rest of all that space will go to the raid 1 setup.

Even as single disks, these seagate perpendicular drives are no slouch. They're 7200 rpm disks with a 16 MB cache. Something about the perpendicular approach to storing data has yielded moderate performance increases over older disks. Obviously, it can't really help the sustained transfer rates, as that's governed by rotational speed. I think it helped in random seeks and writes instead.
 
Update: It's at 3.29 GHz now, apparently stable. I last ran 3dmark06 at a little over 3 GHz and it posted 12,4xx. This is with the videocard still at default speeds.
 
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