Hard drive configuration - looking for expert advice

[lordbane]

Hi guys,

 

On my new A64 X2 rig I have the following drives:

 

200GB Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 w/16MB cache PATA

2 x 250GB Maxtor DiamondMAX 10 w/16MB cache SATA

 

The SATA drives are configured as:

 

Raid 0 - 64K stripes - SATA1 + SATA2 on the nForce4 RAID controller

 

 

My questions:

 

Would it make sense to leave the 200GB as my main boot drive with Windows XP installed and move all my games and applications to the RAID Array as much as possible?

 

Would I get the best performance that way with not having my OS on the same drives as my games or would the extra performance be cancelled out by the slower boot time and load time of Windows and Windows DLLs, etc.?

 

If I did move the OS to the RAID Array, would I benefit from moving the SWAP file to the PATA drive?

 

I'm really at a loss as to what to do here to get the best performance from my drives so any help is appreciated!

[RGone]

If mine the O/s and games would be on the two sata drives in raid 0 with those partitioned to allow O/s on one partition and proggies to another and games to another partition all on the sata in raid 0 and the PATA drive used as a back up drive for storing images of the sata in raid 0 for safety. Do it that way myself all the time from the start 7 years ago.

 

RGone...

[lordbane]

Hi RGone,

 

Thanks for the advice.

 

I'm Ghosting the current image on my PATA drive to the RAID Array (made 2 partitions and I'm using one for the image).

 

I can give that a try and see how it works.

 

Should I put the page file on the PATA drive?

 

PS - Nice case for your Avatar. I have the black X-Navigator myself. It rocks!

 

Thanks

[Fight Game]

I agree with RGone. That's the way I do it, too. If you wanted you could use as much of the 200GB as possible to back up important data, and also for the location of the virtual memory (although I doubt this will make any difference because the raid would be faster, but so would having it on a seperate drive by itself).

[RGone]

I would leave the page file alone most of the time unless you really intend to do the benches to "prove" any benefit to moving the page file. If not checked real close moving swap file can slow things.

 

Yep that case is tough but I am thinking now to go and get the X-cruiser instead for the DFI CF-BT when it gets here. I have another board can put in that one.

 

RGone...

[lordbane]

RGone,

 

I'm having a serious problem.

 

Whenever the PATA drive is enabled it automatically assigns itself as the primary boot device in Windows despite the BIOS being set to have the RAID device as the primary (boot order is set to the RAID array as the master boot device).

 

It doesn't matter if the PATA drive is a master on either IDE controller, Windows will not accept that it's not the primary boot device and it automatically boots off the PATA drive if it's detected (reorders it to "C:").

 

If I remove the drive from the loop, I can install and boot off the RAID array just fine, but as soon as I put it the PATA drive with Windows on it back in....BLAMMO. It becomes the primary boot device again!

 

Is there a way around this?

 

623-3 BIOS nf4 UT SLI-DR

 

My NF2 Infinity doesn't have this issue. What is going on with this motherboard??? Why is it ignoring the boot drive order setting in the BIOS?

[iJeff]

I had this problem -- I have one SATA and one PATA drive.

 

Had to reinstall windows on the SATA drive with only that drive connected. Therefore it became the primary boot drive.

 

Then, when windows was all set up, I installed + connected the PATA drive. It then assigned a later drive letter to that drive.