Drive configuration to improve performance

[pizzaboyuk]

I have the following HDD drives:

1x 6gb/s,7200rpm,64mb cache,1tb.

1x 3gb/s,5400rpm,64mb cache,1tb.

3x 3gb/s,7200rpm,16mb cache,500gb.

1x 3gb/s,7200rpm,8mb cache,250gb.

Originally I used a Core2Quad@2.6ghz,4gb ddr3@533mhz (1pair), with a nvidia gt430 for gaming, and for office work I had a Pentium dual core@2.9ghz,2gb ddr3@533mhz(single), with nvidia 9500gt.

Never really thought much about hard drives apart from the size, but after doing some video encoding on both of the pcs, I noticed the quad core was slower than the dual (and by quite a bit).

The dual has a 3gb/s,8mb cache for the OS, and a 3gb/s,16mb cache for downloads and documents.

The quad has a 3gb/s,8mb cache for the OS, and the 5400rpm,3gb/s,1tb for downloads and documents.

Both run win7 64bit and downloads are quite intensive. As I stored the videos for encoding on the 5400rpm drive, I'm wondering was this affecting the time of the encodes?

I now have an i7 with a nvidia gtx970 which I will dedicate for gaming, but I also have an elgato video capture card, so should I use the 6gb/s hard drive solely for the video capture/editing rather than use it to install the OS and games?

Is the rule of thumb fastest rpm with largest cache for documents (stuff thats opened and edited often) or should they kept for the OS and program installs? I presume partitioning is out of the question as they would still use up the same bandwidth?

Suggestions for all 3 configs (gaming: i7, misc: quad & office work: dual) would be very much appreciated.

[W-L]

-SNIP-

 

 

I'm no expert at this but I remember that if you partition your drives in at specific sizes you can gain a certain amount of performance from them.

It's best to have the fastest drive for video editing and encoding basically a scratch disk that will see the most use.

For games the 5400rpm drives shouldn't bottle neck anything too much other than load times.

 

 

[Captain_WD]

I have the following HDD drives:

1x 6gb/s,7200rpm,64mb cache,1tb.

1x 3gb/s,5400rpm,64mb cache,1tb.

3x 3gb/s,7200rpm,16mb cache,500gb.

1x 3gb/s,7200rpm,8mb cache,250gb.

Originally I used a Core2Quad@2.6ghz,4gb ddr3@533mhz (1pair), with a nvidia gt430 for gaming, and for office work I had a Pentium dual core@2.9ghz,2gb ddr3@533mhz(single), with nvidia 9500gt.

Never really thought much about hard drives apart from the size, but after doing some video encoding on both of the pcs, I noticed the quad core was slower than the dual (and by quite a bit).

The dual has a 3gb/s,8mb cache for the OS, and a 3gb/s,16mb cache for downloads and documents.

The quad has a 3gb/s,8mb cache for the OS, and the 5400rpm,3gb/s,1tb for downloads and documents.

Both run win7 64bit and downloads are quite intensive. As I stored the videos for encoding on the 5400rpm drive, I'm wondering was this affecting the time of the encodes?

I now have an i7 with a nvidia gtx970 which I will dedicate for gaming, but I also have an elgato video capture card, so should I use the 6gb/s hard drive solely for the video capture/editing rather than use it to install the OS and games?

Is the rule of thumb fastest rpm with largest cache for documents (stuff thats opened and edited often) or should they kept for the OS and program installs? I presume partitioning is out of the question as they would still use up the same bandwidth?

Suggestions for all 3 configs (gaming: i7, misc: quad & office work: dual) would be very much appreciated.

 

 

Hey pizzaboyuk,

 

Generally it is true that the higher the RPM, the faster the drive. When evaluating a drive's performance, you should consider several things:

-RPM: the speed that the drive rotates at as this affects the read/write speed a lot

-cache: the size of the cache determines how fast a drive handles files and also affects its performance

-size: depending on needs, the size matters if someone is looking for a compact drive or for a large storage space (noise and heat are also affected by the size and the speed of the drive)

-firmware: each drive is tuned for different purposes and the firmware enables it to have the ultimate performance for it's specific purpose (i.e. WD Black for performance, WD Red for NAS/RAID environments, WD Purple for surveillance environments, etc.) - this also affects the drive's performance and speed

-additional features: some drives come with additional features to enable them to better perform and deliver better results/durability (such as WD Black which has a built-in processor for faster data handling)

 

Games rely on storage only for their loading times and FPS and graphics are not affected in any way. Some games use the drives more intensively because they need to load huge texture files while in-game.

 

Editing and content creation rely heavily on storage as they work with huge files and folders and read/write speed is crucial for the performance.

 

Logical computing and number crunching do not rely on storage as everything is processed mainly by the CPU, RAM and sometimes GPU.

 

Drives perform differently depending on their usage (long-term (cold) storage, gaming, programming, editing/content creation, streaming, NAS, backup, simple computing, recording, etc.) and thus there are different types of hard drives with different speeds, settings and features.

 

Hope this answers your question. Feel free to ask me if you have any other questions

 

Captain_WD.

[pizzaboyuk]

Thanks captain amd W-L for the great video link.

Kinda got the gist of it, was just confused why my quad was performing twice (sometimes even more) as slow with the video encoding than the dual, even though it had a much better processor, double the ram and a much better graphics card...