3d Benchmarking

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by centrifuge
I actually just did a reformat and re-install about a week ago.

There really isn't that much to it if your bios are set to use the RAID. Like I said in the post above, the only tricky part is installing the SATA drivers (by pressing F6 during setup) so that WinXP will recognize the drives, otherwise it will only recognize any IDE HDD's that might be on the system

Sorry to be a pain but do you mean you formatted both drives entirely? Obviously that's not what I want.

[DrSpike]

Also a while back loads of people were reporting problems booting from SATA drives..........were those just teething problems?

[Zopperoni]

I had no problems at all installing Windows XP on my S-ATA harddrive.
When I was running on my old harddisk, I did patch my motherboard with a S-ATA patch. I didn't need any special disks to install Windows on my HD.

Intel, integrity to build on

[centrifuge]

Well, with a RAID 0, the 2 drives function as 1. So the OS system thinks that there is only one drive. So yes, I did do a complete reformat of both drives.

If you use other versions of RAID like RAID 1 or 1.5, then it simultaneously writes to both drives, so that if one drive goes out then you have another drive left that has all of the same info on it. I unfortunately don't have experience with RAIDs other than RAID 0 so I'm probably not the best person to answer your question.

Though the general rule is, that RAID 0 is used for increased performance, while the other types of RAID are for primarily data safety.

[alva]

Could you combine boh options with having for drives?

[centrifuge]

Alva,

I have no idea if that would work or not.

Originally posted by centrifuge
I'm probably not the best person to answer your question.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by centrifuge
Well, with a RAID 0, the 2 drives function as 1. So the OS system thinks that there is only one drive. So yes, I did do a complete reformat of both drives.

As I thought. So if you have 240GB of space in total and you want to reinstall where do you put your possibly large amounts of stuff? Or can you partition the 2 drives once RAIDed?

[centrifuge]

Yeah, you can partition them just like any other drive.

Or you can do like I did and get a 3rd ATA drive for bulky data like movies, music and pictures.

[DrSpike]

Ah ok, then that upgrade is one I might consider. However 2 120GB SATA drives costs the best part of £150, so I'll try and get some more mileage from my current drives.

I'm interested to know the performance increase.

[DrSpike]

Btw SC I tried PCMark but unless I register and pay it wont do any interesting tests.

[centrifuge]

I'd go with the 10,000 rpm western digitals over the 7200 rpm seagates. Unfortunately The western digitals are even harder on the wallet and have less storage space.

...but they're just so damned fast

[centrifuge]

BTW,

Using the Radeonator 2.0 tweaking utility, I pumped the core on my videocard up slightly to 337MHz from the original 324 MHz.


With the slightly overclocked card I now have an AquaMark3 score of 40,118

Down with 64 bit processors

[DrSpike]

Hmm, I spy a contest that could end in burning components.

I'm in.

I'll download later.

[Spaced Cowboy]

Originally posted by DrSpike
Btw SC I tried PCMark but unless I register and pay it wont do any interesting tests.

Oh, I forgot, I'll email you some help when I get home.

[DrSpike]

Originally posted by Spaced Cowboy


Oh, I forgot, I'll email you some help when I get home.

Understood.