Best "C" Drive setup for speed

Hi,

Im getting increasingly annoyed at the speed of my C drive. Copying anything from or too the drive gives me read/write speeds of less than 10MB/sec. The drive is only 2/3 full and doesnt look too fragmented

This is upsetting when i have a pair of Samsung F3 1TB drives and i get over 100MB/sec between them.

The C drive runs Vista Pro 64 on a Phenomn X3 8650 with 4Gb RAM.

Obviously the slowness of the C drive (which is SATA but 1.5Gb/sec and about 4 years old) will be slowing down my OS and loading of software.

Looking to replace it with something faster.

I looked to SSD but the money is silly!

I looked at the 10000RPM WD velociraptor drives but again cost seams high.

I'm almost wondering if i would be better buying two fast 250-500Gb drives and having them in RAID 0 mode for combined size and speed. The increased data vulnerability of RAID 0 doesn't bother me as i have nothing of value on the C drive, all my precious data is kept on separate drives.

Looking at the 10000RPM WD drives, i can get two Samsung F3 1TB for the cost of one WD 300Gb drive!

What do you folks here think i would be best with?

Stuart

 

This article may be of interest:

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/11/09/review_storage_kingston_ssd_now_v_40gb/

It suggests using a relatively small SSD as your system drive with large HDD to hold documents.

 

I had looked at SSD. Its the value aspect of it.

I can get a 1TB drive with over 100MB/sec R/W for the price of a 32Gb SSD, yes it can work twice as fast with 10-20times the seak times, but even then, its 30X the price!

I was thinking of a few options:

Have the boot/OS/Program Files/Temp drive as two RAID 0 drives (understanding the risks but not fussed as there is no valuable data on them).

-or-

Using the two 1TB drives i have, buy another 3 giving me 5Tb, buy a decent hardware RAID card (such as £120 HighPoint RocketRAID 2680LF). Put the lot together on RAID 5 (i know the write speed isnt so fast but faster than one drive). I would set the whole 4TB (+1Tb partity) up as a 4TB array, then partition this to C drive and my data drives.

I seen: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/10tb-hdd-raid,2344.html and that looks fun! But excessive and needs a pricey RAID card.

Perhaps with the 5 drives, i could achieve at least both sequential 200MB/sec read and write?

Another idea i had to speed things up more was to add a small 16-32Gb SSD drive again with data rate around the 200MB/sec mark (not part of the RAID array) and use this for temp files/scratch disk/pagefile etc?

Total costs would be:
£180 for 3 new HDD's
£120 for the 8 port hardware RAID card
?£100? for the SSD
Total = £400

Any thoughts on this folks?

Stuart

 

Consider...

Something to consider is the new Western Digital Caviar Black 2TB Hard Drive. A very detailed review with benchmarks at:

http://www.hardwarecanucks.com/foru...gital-caviar-black-2tb-hard-drive-review.html

I purchased mine from TigerDirect for $300 USD and it was in stock. Runs a bit hoter than my WD VelocityRaptor 10k and is certainly NOT "green ". About 5 degrees and I don't notice or even hear the beast running. If you can wait, this new WD drive is sure to drive down the costs of the 10K drives they offer. I cringe when I think what I paid for the 10K which is about the same price as this new WD drive. Ouch

HTH

 

if all you want is a 2x hdd setup for the boot drive just get a couple of cheap WD2500aajs drives and use the mobo's onboard sata raid to form a raid0 array then store everything else on other HDD's

 

Thanks for the suggestions folks,

I would probably be OK running a RAID 0 from the MB as my "C" drive, i wounldt want to run a RAID 5 array from the MB due to the drain of CPU resources doing the RAID 5 work.

Im still looking into it.

Thanks again

Stuart

 

what processor do you have stuart

 

Its an Athlon 64bit 8650 3 Core.

Thanks,
Stuart

 

you'd most likely not even notice a drain on that cpu while using raid 5 maybe if it you had an old single core then you might

 

but saying that most south bridge based sata controllers aren't going to support raid5 more like raid 0, 1, 0+1, 10, JBOD