Jump to content
The mkiv Supra Owners Club

I'm back - computers.....pfft


Lewis

Recommended Posts

No mobo suggestions - your going P4 and therefore deserve no answer to help you on your quest to hell.

 

I don't see your reasoning behand the drive layout. Do you honestly think that a partitioned drive would run slower than about a .244 second delay?

 

You would need some sort of atomic timekeeper with stupid powers of time calculation to be able to find that time difference.

 

Don't take this the wrong way - it's an honest question.... do you actually know what your doing or are you copying your mates set-up or something you have seen/read?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Replies 58
  • Created
  • Last Reply

Top Posters In This Topic

Originally posted by Jake

I'm sure they are mate but they're no use to me without buying new HDDs are they? Like I said, my mobo supports sata, but I'm not replacing 400 gig of disk to switch to sata - well not just yet anyway.

 

 

Dude... Switch? Pfft - RUN BOTH :D

 

Thats what I am doing, there are now 5 HDD's in the box.

 

I'll get ya a 200GB S-ata for about 80Quid (unless you can find them cheaper on ebuyer or something??)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by stealthhosts

No mobo suggestions - your going P4 and therefore deserve no answer to help you on your quest to hell.

 

I don't see your reasoning behand the drive layout. Do you honestly think that a partitioned drive would run slower than about a .244 second delay?

 

You would need some sort of atomic timekeeper with stupid powers of time calculation to be able to find that time difference.

 

Don't take this the wrong way - it's an honest question.... do you actually know what your doing or are you copying your mates set-up or something you have seen/read?

 

It's cool dude, I take it all as 'constructive criticism'. :)

 

tbh, here's my reasoning; The high capacity D: is only there to store stuff on - music and video, that's all. The C: which has the OS, swap file and apps needs to be as fast as hell, cos the hard drive (in my experience) is by far the slowest link in the chain, and getting the fastest one you can helps loads.

 

So... I figured going for a low capacity fast C: and a high capacity D: which only needs to be accessed at the bandwidth of the streamed media (which goes to RAM anyway) but then it's only the access times that make the difference really.

 

Having seen people buy cheap big hard drives for their C: for years, I've always found a hard drive with fast large cache and quick access times for the C: does make a huge difference, yes.

 

If I could afford to, I would copy my mates set up and just have all Raptors. But I can't. :p

 

Thanks for your help with the mobo btw. :blink:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Hmmm...... ok - that makes more sense (in some ways).

 

The reason that you find large drives being slow is because they are poorly partitioned.

 

Your swapfile will reside on your root drive anyway (therefore on the partition)

 

If you go for a sata drive then your C will be far faster than any IDE drive anyway - regardless of whether its a physical drive or a partition.

 

With regards to your streaming media - we are talking HDD's here, not buffering over LAN's - it will be just as quick either way.

And there will be zero noticable difference.

 

It's your money mate, but I think you are throwing perfectly good money away in both the hardware itself and in the setup (ie Intel & multiple drives).

 

 

The speed of your O/S and relating factors will only be affected by husbandry AFAIC, defrag your disk, keep it clear of temp files and run a regular chkdsk and you will have no speed issues at all.

 

I have a 10GB O/S physical drive (7200) - hypocrite?, no - I had the drives laying around anyway. I wouldn't go and buy one for the purpose.

As far as HDD's being the slowest link it all depends on your set-up. HDD transfer rates far exceed bus speeds and therefore your mobo will be the slower of the two.

 

At the end of the day, regardless of what you buy - a PC is only as fast as it's slowest part.

 

Like I say - it's your money.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

It's all true, thanks for your input.

 

So you would just get a big-ass 250GB SATA drive and partition a C: from it? Keep it tidy and defragged and well maintained and not bother with a separate C:?

 

I guess I would save a lot of money that way, it's a good point. I also don't NEED a P4E chip, but I can't find a cheap P4 chip ~2GHz which is all I really need. Maybe I should look on eBay.

 

I'm not arguing, but I've had Intel and AMD chips, and maybe it was the way I've had them set up, but as far as I can see, AMD and Intel are comparable for price and performance but Intels run cooler and with more stability. Everyone's had different experiences I guess, but I just wouldn't bother getting AMD again - I don't see there's any saving.

 

I'm going to look at eBay... ;)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by stealthhosts

I'll get ya a 200GB S-ata for about 80Quid

Thanks mate. I live near Novatech though and they have this for £90. Look ok to you?

 

Were you saying it IS or ISN'T worth partitioning large drives? I always use mine as one large partition, I hate having more drive letters than necessary, but then I'm not a very organised person.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

na mate not calling u stupid i meant, it be stupid to hold back in the work place to a 32bit server when u can have 64bit server as in work palce a server...is well normally a dedicated server that sits there. i cant be arsed to rewrite that line though lol

 

and as for 32bit first....u know i meant 64 bit :D

 

i guess from what u saying if ur pc got the guts for the emulation then go 64 bit. will surely slow some high power games drrasticaly doing all that emulation though?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

With regards to the games and "emulation" i should have said earlier.... It isn't emulation in the way that it is in XP.

 

It simply runs them in 32-bit. Thereby using half the power it has (kind of - but not quite).

 

It uses the CPU in 32-bit instead of 64-bit mode. Hard to explain.

 

Like I say - I ran 12 instances of OFCWC and it was using 44% of the CPU - I can't see any single game requiring that much - to my knowledge anyway.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by Jake

Thanks mate. I live near Novatech though and they have this for £90. Look ok to you?

 

Were you saying it IS or ISN'T worth partitioning large drives? I always use mine as one large partition, I hate having more drive letters than necessary, but then I'm not a very organised person.

 

Thats the exact drive I could get you for a tenner less (although with delivery it would probably be the same price).See my original post - those are the drives I bought "£71.64+vat"

 

It is prudent to partition large drives from a technical point of view, the main reason being that when indexing and accessing goies on in the drive it is searching and listing blank space on the drive which is a waste of time and system resources.

 

In my opinion it is preferable to have smaller drives (if you have them) if you don't then just partition a large drive.

 

This is of course all in my ever-so-humble opinion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

u got to partition god help u if u get a bad sector develop on one part of hard drive making whole hard drive unreadable :eek: id cry lol

 

ahh so it changes the chips mode....i like sounds of that better then emulating by a mile!!

 

What u think of scsi drives?? although they seem to work quicker i cant really make my mind up whether it worth it,at work we have scsi card to 2x 18GB scsi 15,000 RPM drives, i think personally a waste of money,but hey it not my money!

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I have a SCSI RAID array you can have if you pick it up -

5X20GB Raid 5

 

 

Um.... I'd choose S-ata over SCSI for home use and SCSI over S-ATA for servers.

 

The *ONLY* reason I wouldn't commit myself to S-ATA's on the servers is because I haven't tested them yet. I have a 2xXEON webserver here that I am going to put 2003 server on - I'll put a SATA in there and see how it performs. My opinion may change after that.

 

The other thing to note is that you can have eleventy million scsi drives daisy chained (with a terminator :D - I once forgot that).

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by stealthhosts

It is prudent to partition large drives from a technical point of view, the main reason being that when indexing and accessing goies on in the drive it is searching and listing blank space on the drive which is a waste of time and system resources.

 

In my opinion it is preferable to have smaller drives (if you have them) if you don't then just partition a large drive.

 

 

OK so smaller drives are better but I experienced problems with stuff not wanting to save or operate from anywhere other than the C drive. I made it too small once and ran out of space lol. I would like to run just my OS from a small C drive and my programs from a D drive and store all my crap on an E drive but I have problems with programs not wanting to install anywhere other than the C drive. How in XP do you get round this?

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by dangerous brain

tweak UI you mean?

 

Yeah, that'll do it. Change the default "Program Files" folder location.

 

All programs will still need to install DLLs and registry settings to the C: of course. Most of them will probably use it for storing temporary files, but again this depends how you've set up your profile space - in XP this is all stored under Documents And Settings. But you can change that too I think.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by dangerous brain

OK so smaller drives are better but I experienced problems with stuff not wanting to save or operate from anywhere other than the C drive. I made it too small once and ran out of space lol. I would like to run just my OS from a small C drive and my programs from a D drive and store all my crap on an E drive but I have problems with programs not wanting to install anywhere other than the C drive. How in XP do you get round this?

 

I don't have a single program installed on my c: drive, all are on my G drive

 

All I do is select a different location lol - normally c: is default but I haven't come accross an installer that doesn't let you change it.

 

Even my office (word etc) is on g:

 

Some files will always be saved to c, like office common files and norton common files but this only adds up to a couple of MB.

 

Just pay more attention when you are installing :p lol

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Originally posted by stealthhosts

If you go for a sata drive then your C will be far faster than any IDE drive anyway - regardless of whether its a physical drive or a partition.

 

I thought a lot of the SATA drives just had the Silicon Image PATA -> SATA bridge chips soldered onto them? So the drive is being communicated to in good old fasioned PATA.

 

Maybe the situation has changed. I know this doesn't apply to all currently available drives, and certainly not the 10kRPM Seagates which have seriously low seek times, but certainly a lot of them.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Join the conversation

You can post now and register later. If you have an account, sign in now to post with your account.
Note: Your post will require moderator approval before it will be visible.

Guest
Reply to this topic...

×   Pasted as rich text.   Restore formatting

  Only 75 emoji are allowed.

×   Your link has been automatically embedded.   Display as a link instead

×   Your previous content has been restored.   Clear editor

×   You cannot paste images directly. Upload or insert images from URL.

×
×
  • Create New...

Important Information

We have placed cookies on your device to help make this website better. You can adjust your cookie settings, otherwise we'll assume you're okay to continue. You might also be interested in our Guidelines, Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.