Quote:
A simple RAID 0 actually does nothing to improve performance. All it's doing is concatenating two or more drives into one big drive. You actually take a small performance hit doing that, and make your system more vulnerable to a single disk failure.
What a bunch of nonsence!!!.
A raid 0 is a striped array, it takes the data and splits it in half, putting half on one drive and the other have on another, hence doubling the read/write/seek times. Also, more imortantly, if you are using a Serial ata drive, you cant get the most throughput (serial ATA 150Mbps) unless you are using a raid array with the correct (Intel,in my case, depends on chipset) raid drivers, windows does not provide RAID drivers, to obtain the maximum speed potential for these types of Harddrives. The default drivers that windows provide are Non-RAID and only allow you to get Serial ATA 100Mbps(even if your MOBO,HD,etc.. are equipped to support RAID and 150Mps sata).
If you are not using a raid array, as I suspect that you are not, my overall system performance will be 2 to 4 times faster than yours with the same or comparable drives ( only one other SATA drive that I know of that has a 10,000 Rpm, and the raptor is faster in all performance test, using Sandra or HD Tach. An ex. of my current HD Tach test results are as follows:
Random Access: 8.3ms
Average Read: 99.4MB/s
Burst speed: 190.1MB/s
A little more on raids.......:
Gbaji is very confused on what is and is not a striped array, A RAID 0, like I mentioned, IS a Striped array. A Description from my Motherboard's users manual(ABIT IC7)....
" The ......Serial ATA controller supports the RAID Array of both Striped (RAID 0) and Mirrored (RAID 1). For the Striped RAID set, the identical drives can read and write data in parallel to increase performance. The Mirrored RAID set creates a complete backup of your files. Striped and Mirrored set requires 2 hard disks to do so."
And later...."Striping (RAID 0): This item is recommended for HIGH PERFORMANCE usage." ....ETC.
then you get into the combination of both that requires at least 4 hard drives, but I wont go there, hehe.
Even if you use a IDE controller, as opposed to a SATA controller (like my onboard Intel 82801ER SATA RAID Controller), you will still see a sigificant system performance increase using a RAID 0 configuration versus a non-raid config.\
However, if you dont have an onboard SATA controller, I strongly suggest getting a SATA RAID Controller Card to install and go that option rather than the IDE controller, as it will provide a much faster transfer rate and you will be able to obtain the true potential of your SATA drives and a RAID config.
If you dont know what you're talking about , dont correct others, period. Sorry for my tone, but cant stand people, who know a little, pretending they know everything.
Also , you were right about the disk and the network, but seem to have forgot the video card is the hardware that has to take all that data and display it, its video memory will play some role in how fast you display the new zone. Dont forget that some of the zone data is stored in video memory. With that said, it will be a smaller factor, the hard drive(S) are more important, a raid 0 using the drives I mentioned will have a sigificant impact on zoning speed.
I agree the network is equally important, which is why I suggested certain tweaks (above post), to test your network speed, latency and Line quality go here.... http://www.broadbandreports.com/tools
Of course this gets way off base from the VM question, but if you want High perfomance gaming, A RAID 0 is a must have,period.
Also, check out the links I gave on network and internet tests and tweaks, that will help too.
Edited, Fri Aug 12 03:51:47 2005 by erikofsantarosa