On Mon, 7 May 2007 19:23:20 +0100, "Trimble Bracegirdle"
<no-spam@never.spam> wrote:

>With my newly put together Home Computer ...games , general purpose use, C2D
>E6600 @ 3.2 Gig, Geforce 8800 ...Win XP or VISTA.
>I'm becoming increasingly aware of speed limitations with standard SATA2
>hard drives I have.

Doing which tasks? Often, HDD speed is a secondary problem
to lack of system memory. Certainly not always.




>looked at the Raptor Drives ...far to expensive for the little improvement
>Re.
>standard SATA2 .

What is it you are expecting, you can get a significant
performance increase without paying not only the base cost
of a drive but also the addt'l cost that higher performers
command?

A Raptor is one popular answer and rightly so because it has
lower latency, without the addt'l expense of SCSI and a SCSI
controller. You don't need substantially higher throughput
(MB/s) for your OS and "general purpose use", but you might
for certain tasks like simple manipulations (not compute
bound) of large, like video, files.




>I really don't like the prospect of RAID...I would need at least 2
>identical drives

No, they don't need to be identical. They need both run
under same interface supported by the controller (whether it
be PATA(nnn) or SATA, SCSI, and your array size is limited
based on the size of the smallest member (drive) in the
array. Somewhere some crazy nut years ago wrongly spread
the myth that RAID needs indentical drives and unfortunately
the myth was propigated by those who didn't read any more or
never tried it.



>with a reduction
>in reliability (2 rather than 1 thing to go wrong) ...to get RAID speed
>improvement with a
>good level of error protection I would need SERIAL ATTACHED SCSI3 or more
>drives ...all to complicated .

Well yes it is an additional level of "complication", and
more expensive. Now you have the crux of why everyone isn't
doing it... but you seem to want MORE than what everyone
else has so... you are weighing same choices everyone else
did and picking one way or the other like everyone else.




>
>SOOO ! what about SCSI Hard drives ...I see Rpm's of 15000 ..access times
>less than 1/2
>that of standard SATA2 ..the only way it could into go in my system is
>(presumably)
>with a controller card into the standard PCI slots (33 MHz) ...does that
>have the speed ??.

It has low latency. One SCSI drive with added cost of a
controller is a poor value, particularly so on a 33MHz/32bit
PCI bus. Better to just get one Raptor, see if you find
that acceptible, then if you do not, get a second one and
RAID them.


Then again you may just have insufficient memory as I'd
stated initially. Without having larger filesets than will
fit in system memory cache, the system shouldn't be
continually having rereads from HDD. Going with Vista you
will exacerbate the problem, more and larger OS files means
more time to read them given same drive(s), unless of course
you had the files cached in system memory, which is what XP
can also do, even moreso if you have enough memory and
specify a large system cache (Google for that).