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KingDaddyO · 16th September 2006

It is possible that your problems are coming from bottlenecks within your single channel disk I/O controller & single physical hard drive. On any specialized application using Windows, it is always a good idea to use one small physical Drive (Drive 0) for the OS (an IDE drive is fine, 10-20 GB... I prefer Seagate or Western Digital - stay away from Quantum or Maxtor), and a RAID array consisting of at least 2 SATA drives for the applications & data. This will separate the OS' disk controller channel from the Application' disk controller channel (which BTW, has nothing to do with the CPU utilization at this stage). By doing this you should realize a higher, more consistent data transfer rate. If this is indeed where your system bottlenecks are occuring, then a RAID configuration will definitely reduce or eliminate any pauses resulting from too much demand, not enough supply in your disk sub-system.

For example, my system uses a 40GB IDE boot drive containing only the OS, and (2) 200GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration for all of my software and data files. Once SATA drives are installed and recognized by Windows, you could allocate the combined 400GB from those 2 drives (using my example) into a single Windows volume, or any number of smaller sized logical volumes... your choice. And with current drives, you can get (2) 300GB drives to create a single 600GB volume! But since you don't have any fault tolerance using RAID 0, a good backup system and plan is essential to protecting your data. All you have to do is follow it, religiously!!

The simplest, least expensive (but highest performance) hardware RAID configuration is RAID 0. This requires a minimum of 2 drives, has no fault tolerance (i.e., redundancy), and simply writes the data across all drives in a process called striping. Very Important: If you do decide to use RAID, only use hardware RAID. Never use software RAID, as it is highly inefficient and you will suffer huge performance hits.

Also note, I am assuming that your system does not have any other fundamental configuration issues, weird problems, old inefficient device drivers, etc. In other words, if your system ever had errors that went unanalyzed and corrected, then everything you have built on top of that foundation... will inherit and amplify those shortcomings going forward.

Good Luck !

16th September 2006	#4
KingDaddyO Lives for gear Joined: Mar 2005 Location: East Coast, U.S.A. Posts: 1,799	It is possible that your problems are coming from bottlenecks within your single channel disk I/O controller & single physical hard drive. On any specialized application using Windows, it is always a good idea to use one small physical Drive (Drive 0) for the OS (an IDE drive is fine, 10-20 GB... I prefer Seagate or Western Digital - stay away from Quantum or Maxtor), and a RAID array consisting of at least 2 SATA drives for the applications & data. This will separate the OS' disk controller channel from the Application' disk controller channel (which BTW, has nothing to do with the CPU utilization at this stage). By doing this you should realize a higher, more consistent data transfer rate. If this is indeed where your system bottlenecks are occuring, then a RAID configuration will definitely reduce or eliminate any pauses resulting from too much demand, not enough supply in your disk sub-system. For example, my system uses a 40GB IDE boot drive containing only the OS, and (2) 200GB SATA drives in a RAID 0 configuration for all of my software and data files. Once SATA drives are installed and recognized by Windows, you could allocate the combined 400GB from those 2 drives (using my example) into a single Windows volume, or any number of smaller sized logical volumes... your choice. And with current drives, you can get (2) 300GB drives to create a single 600GB volume! But since you don't have any fault tolerance using RAID 0, a good backup system and plan is essential to protecting your data. All you have to do is follow it, religiously!! The simplest, least expensive (but highest performance) hardware RAID configuration is RAID 0. This requires a minimum of 2 drives, has no fault tolerance (i.e., redundancy), and simply writes the data across all drives in a process called striping. Very Important: If you do decide to use RAID, only use hardware RAID. Never use software RAID, as it is highly inefficient and you will suffer huge performance hits. Also note, I am assuming that your system does not have any other fundamental configuration issues, weird problems, old inefficient device drivers, etc. In other words, if your system ever had errors that went unanalyzed and corrected, then everything you have built on top of that foundation... will inherit and amplify those shortcomings going forward. Good Luck ! __________________ ~8^) The enemy isn't liberalism or conservatism, the enemy is bullshit -- Lars-Erik Nelson Now, when there's no longer surface noise and you actually have the ability to have the most extraordinary dynamic range, people aren't using it -- T-Bone Burnett The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them -- Albert Einstein I'm not black, but there's a whole lot of times I wish I could say I'm not white -- Frank Zappa