Kangaroo said:
RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks".
Reduntant array of
Independant Disks
Kangaroo said:
Basically what it does is theoretically half the write time and read time. Below I will show you the difference at which non-RAID and RAID -0 ATA hard drives theoretically read and write to the hard drives.
This depends on the type of RAID-array. a mirrored set rarely has an improved write time, but can have improved readtimes due to the 2 disks being able to provide data.
Kangaroo said:
Non-RAID Read/Write
Say the hard drive was the write your username "Cheerios", and it were to do this letter by letter over time - time increases DOWN the page
Write.
C
h
e
e
r
i
o
s
See the length of your name now
If one line were to equal a second then it would take the hard drive 8 seconds to write your name.
RAID -0 | Read/Write
Same situation but writing to 2 hard drvies simultaneously
First HDD | Second HDD
C | h
e | e
r | i
o | s
This would theoretically take half the time (4 seconds with time increasing down the page).
Not half the time, nearly half the time, cuz the RAID-controller has to calculate what's written to which disk
Kangaroo said:
RAID -1 does a mirror image of you main hard drive, its the best way to back up your information - you get it twice!
Main HDD | Backup HDD (mirror)
C | C
h | h
e | e
e | e
r | r
i | i
o | o
s | s
Hope that helps. Also hope it displays correctly
[/B]
Good explaination, except for some details.
cheerios said:
hmm i get the point but other than backing up your com, i guess it would make ur loading alot faster rite? about half the normal time?
Yeah, it increases speed a lot. During a LAN-party i noticed my "slow" Xp 1800+ loaded games & levels much faster then ppls with 2,8ghz P4's & a better VGA graphics(i had a gf4 mx 440 back then)
I had 2 40gig HDD's in a striped(=RAID-0) set, and a seprate boot disk. Using the boot disk for system and half my pagefile(windows swaps form and to is if your internal memory is full, which happens quite fast when playing games) and my raid-array
for the games and the other half of the page file.
Didn't load twice as fast, but fast enuf to grab some artillery b4 the foe does
Kangaroo said:
Didn't even think about the PCI bus
Oberjaeger is right, every component would have to be top of the range to keep up with your CPU.
But to have the fastest system I would recommend very fast RAM,
and lots of it!
No consumer level HDD makes it to 133mb/s sustained transfer. The pata bus supports up to 133mb/s, generaly, most disks don;t even make it to 30mb sustained data transfer.
Striped sets increase the sustained transfer quote a bit, but also seek actions and multiple write actions take much less time....
Kangaroo said:
The speed at which your CPU accesses your RAM is based on your FSB. If your CPU has an FSB speed at 333MHz (like my current CPU) but your memory has a speed of 400MHz (my current Corsair) then your CPU would simply access your memory at 333MHz.
If your CPU (333MHz) is faster than your memory (266MHz) then your FSB speed would slow down to a speed of 266MHz.
It is abviously a bit more complicated than above, but thats the easiest way to put it.
Not entirely true, the datatransfer across the fsb goes with 333 mhz untill the northbridge, there it's goign over on the 400mhz memory bus. The faster memory bus has to wait every 1,2 clock cycle. This gives a lot of troubles and slows down performance to even worse levels then when the ram is running @ the same speed as the fsb. Same goes for the otherway around..
asupertech said:
It is unlogical. A system with 800fsb is faster with 133mhz ram(i doubt there are 800mhz fsb mobo's supporting sdram tho)
and a 3ghz proc then with a 2.0 ghz proc.
In both cases the mem is utterly slow, but the cpu processes more data then just form the ram, also form the agp card and hdd's, which is proccesed faster by the 3ghz proc then the 2ghz one.
the slowest part is the bottle neck, but it's not soley the slowest part that sets the speed.