games on seperate drive?

If I partition a 74G raptor 20/50 like one of the earlier posts. Do I put OS and apps on the 20 portion and then the games on the 50? Or just OS on the 20 and apps/games on the 50? (This is with my 160G WD for storage and page file).
thanks.
 
vmerc said:
That rule is for office workers, and people that have too little RAM to start with. You have 1GB of RAM. Nothing that you will do is going to require 3GB of total memory space.

Think about it. If you are playing BF2, and you decide to add another 1GB of RAM, you aren't going to need to increase your VRAM to 4GB to match the 2x rule. In fact, if you have 2GB of RAM you probably could get away with little or no VRAM at all.

Games use what they're going to use. If it's more than what you have in physical RAM, you're not going to be able to play anyway.

If your system overall uses more than the phyical RAM in your system, then you need VRAM, but if you're playing a game you want to shut down any other programs before you start. With this being the case, the amount of VRAM needed to store anything that might go over Physical RAM is going to be fairly small.

If you use your computer for things other than gaming, I have to wonder what you could possibly load that would require more RAM than the current wave of PC games. Even if you are multi-tasking like a MOFO, you are going to be hard pressed to match the RAM requirements of a single game running. If you're running some huge DB or server on your gaming machine, then I'll just shut up now so I don't get banned. ;)



It's also a good idea to make your VRAM be the same size for max and min. That way the file cannot resize itself and get all fragged up. The swap file cannot be defragged normally, and is a general pain in the neck to get defragged.
Click to expand...


True....
I'm still carrying that rule from the days when 256MB was all that I had. Now I've got a lot more - and bigger hard drives also - so still using it doesn't really hurt me. :D

The apps that I use mostly are 3d Engineering CAD/CAM stuff. SolidEdge, Solid Works, AutoCAD, Unigraphics, Esprit and Algor - and Coordinate Measuring Machine software that uses 3d solid models. And of course Office.

Some of my files are 1-3GB in size, but the apps generally only load the active part of the file.

And with this stuff, it's very memory intensive by itself, but most of the time you are also running Excel, Word, Publisher or other Office type apps for some of your data, 2D apps for viewing prints while you're modeling, Outlook for that quick email for clarification of the datuming system of the model or assembly you are working on, IE for checking your vendor's specifications on his website and some times multiple instances of it, Acrobat - lots of prints come in that format now plus all of your manuals do. Then there are the days that you are having to do a bunch of data mining from our mainframe COPICS databases and get that mess translated, sorted, and stuffed into an Access DB or huge spread sheet inorder to boil it down to a 3 page Publisher Presentation

On a slow day I only keep 4-5 Apps running. On a busy day I've had 10-15 open programs.
And that's on top of the normal taskbar processes like McAfees, winzip, ActiveSync, etc ad nauseum.

And that's on my work computer....
My home system is the one for gaming, and it's a lot faster than the one at work.

So, that's just a rule of thumb that's worked for me for a long time, and doesn't hurt me now that I've got a lot of RAM, because I can afford the lost hard drive space.

Cheers,


 
runLoganrun said:
If I partition a 74G raptor 20/50 like one of the earlier posts. Do I put OS and apps on the 20 portion and then the games on the 50? Or just OS on the 20 and apps/games on the 50? (This is with my 160G WD for storage and page file).
thanks.
Click to expand...

Either way works.....
Find a system that lets you organize everything to suit your tastes.

If you do an OS only partition - make it at least 10GB.
K* did a 4GB OS part one time and had probs when he ran out of space on it.

Personally, my Raptor is just one partition. And every thing is in "Program Files"
But I have had just a Games folder before.

Do what works for you.

What we tell you is what works for us.....It's not necessarily the best way of doing stuff.

 
press ctrl+shift+escape goto performance tab, looking under teh physical memory portion on the window.

A better option is to goto control panel, admin tools, open up performance, add a token to the graph to watch total physical memory usage over time.
 
Apart from allowing to format the OS partition without affecting data/ savegames, there is no real reason to have games on a seperate partition. It may adversely affect performance, since it may require more head movement than if they were on a single partition with the OS.

The advantage of using multiple drives is that one can utilize multiple actuators independently. Instead of having one head move around between the game files that need to be loaded and other stuff that could be required while you are playing the game, you can split the load between multiple actuactors, hence reducing the average movement, thereby lowering the latency.

RAID0-ed drives do not benefit from this, however they can sustain a higher transfer rate.

Whether a person is going to see a real-world advantage to having games, OS and data on 3 different drives depends strongly on the usage scenario and the connection of the HDDs. If the HDDs are sharing a channel, the improvment is likely to be smaller than if they were on independent channels.

QED.
 
drizzt81 said:
...The advantage of using multiple drives is that one can utilize multiple actuators independently. Instead of having one head move around between the game files that need to be loaded and other stuff that could be required while you are playing the game, you can split the load between multiple actuactors, hence reducing the average movement, thereby lowering the latency...
Click to expand...
Wow! I have heard people talk about configuring hard drives so many times before, but hearing you talk about "utilizing" individual actuators puts it on a whole new level. You build this image of users sitting there directly controlling the actuator movement. Since I know that's not the case I fall back on the idea that someone who is even aware that they are utilizing actuators when they load a game. Still, I get this pleasent thought of commanding the hard drives to access here then there. Telling one to read and the other to write at the same time! FASTER FASTER!!! MUHAHAHAHA!
 
rodsfree said:
True....
I'm still carrying that rule from the days when 256MB was all that I had. Now I've got a lot more - and bigger hard drives also - so still using it doesn't really hurt me. :D

The apps that I use mostly are 3d Engineering CAD/CAM stuff. SolidEdge, Solid Works, AutoCAD, Unigraphics, Esprit and Algor - and Coordinate Measuring Machine software that uses 3d solid models. And of course Office.

Some of my files are 1-3GB in size, but the apps generally only load the active part of the file.

And with this stuff, it's very memory intensive by itself, but most of the time you are also running Excel, Word, Publisher or other Office type apps for some of your data, 2D apps for viewing prints while you're modeling, Outlook for that quick email for clarification of the datuming system of the model or assembly you are working on, IE for checking your vendor's specifications on his website and some times multiple instances of it, Acrobat - lots of prints come in that format now plus all of your manuals do. Then there are the days that you are having to do a bunch of data mining from our mainframe COPICS databases and get that mess translated, sorted, and stuffed into an Access DB or huge spread sheet inorder to boil it down to a 3 page Publisher Presentation

On a slow day I only keep 4-5 Apps running. On a busy day I've had 10-15 open programs.
And that's on top of the normal taskbar processes like McAfees, winzip, ActiveSync, etc ad nauseum.

And that's on my work computer....
My home system is the one for gaming, and it's a lot faster than the one at work.

So, that's just a rule of thumb that's worked for me for a long time, and doesn't hurt me now that I've got a lot of RAM, because I can afford the lost hard drive space.

Cheers,


Click to expand...
Well you didn't say that this was your work computer that we're talking about. I generally assume that people are referring to their home systems when they post here. Since you are running all of those high end programs on your system at work, they probably all have their own internal swap space system built in, thereby circumventing the entire Windows VRAM system. So while you may be using files that are larger than the RAM size, you can still get away with very little VRAM. I have noticed that most programs that are worth their salt and handle large amounts of data will have their own swap system since it can be perfectly tuned to the data that way.
 
hello

im in process of building a new high end rig.

soon im to buy HDs and i was very interested in this discustion.

Im wondering would this be and optimal solutin for me.
1. HD --> 36Gb 10Krpm Raptor for Windows/ aps ( 2 partitions )
2. HD --> 36Gb 10Krpm Raptor for Games / Page file ( 2 partitions )
3. HD --> some 250 Gb 7.2 Krpm hdd for all kind of low usage data.
 
Ivo said:
hello

im in process of building a new high end rig.

soon im to buy HDs and i was very interested in this discustion.

Im wondering would this be and optimal solutin for me.
1. HD --> 36Gb 10Krpm Raptor for Windows/ aps ( 2 partitions )
2. HD --> 36Gb 10Krpm Raptor for Games / Page file ( 2 partitions )
3. HD --> some 250 Gb 7.2 Krpm hdd for all kind of low usage data.
Click to expand...

First off, normally, you start a new thread for stuff like this, but you're new, so I'll be nice. The 36GB raptor does not offer much performance increase over modern 250GB drives. The 74GB raptor does, but it's still not incredible. My recommendation would be a single 74GB raptor for Windows/Games and and large normal drive for storage.
 
I'd be willing to bet that the Hitachi T7K250, 16MB Maxtor drives, and the WD2500KS would all deliver better application/game loading performance than WD360GD, deliver 200 more gigs, and do much better environmentally, for the same price as WD360GD. WD360GD is not recommended in the Buyer's Guide for these very sound reasons.

For most users, SLED with the largest 7200RPM they can afford is the way to go. Some users that value uptime may benefit from having a second drive as an online backup in addition to removable backups, and users that work with large media files can benefit from RAID-0. However, most gamers simply don't need a second HDD...the benefits don't outweigh the cost in my judgment.
 
I didn't see it mentioned but someone could take some posts to mean they should get rid of the page file if they have 2G or more mem. Last I checked that will hurt WINXP and earlier OS performance. XP by default loads info into the page file on boot up. Thats one of the resons you should move the swap to a dif physical drive. OS operations read from the swap and the OS part at the same time for certain operations. There is a Reg tweak to move some of that page file OS data to RAM on startup (loose some avail ram but speeds up some OS functions), but not all of it. XP is hard coded to load some of the info to page file only. I don't know the specifics, maybe someone with more knowledge can post something?
I don't think it breaks XP just makes things slower. May have to extract/decomprese info each time if its not in swap maybe? dunno.

Otherwise if your not running a server/data bases, and you don;t multitask hard 2g mem won't need a large swap file. Definatly not 4G. more like 500M.
 
DougLite said:
I'd be willing to bet that the Hitachi T7K250, 16MB Maxtor drives, and the WD2500KS would all deliver better application/game loading performance than WD360GD, deliver 200 more gigs, and do much better environmentally, for the same price as WD360GD. WD360GD is not recommended in the Buyer's Guide for these very sound reasons.

For most users, SLED with the largest 7200RPM they can afford is the way to go. Some users that value uptime may benefit from having a second drive as an online backup in addition to removable backups, and users that work with large media files can benefit from RAID-0. However, most gamers simply don't need a second HDD...the benefits don't outweigh the cost in my judgment.
Click to expand...


What about WD1600SD? What is SLED?
 
runLoganrun said:
What about WD1600SD? What is SLED?
Click to expand...
SLED = Single Large Expensive Disk. (Don't feel bad, I had to ask a while back, too.)

There's my Maxtor 160GB (OS drive) vs. a 36GB Raptor. I'd expect the WD1600SD to be similar.
 
So: some of those SLED's are going to be the most fast and efficient, SATA, drives, like that 400GB WD? But then that's a lot of storage space, I for one don't need 400GB, do you just buy it for it's performance and have all that space sit there?
thanks.
 
I don't get the above chart. Both the SATA drives are slower than what SATA should be? And the Raptor is slower than the other one? Just because it has faster read/write/seek times doesn't mean its faster?
 
runLoganrun said:
I don't get the above chart. Both the SATA drives are slower than what SATA should be? And the Raptor is slower than the other one? Just because it has faster read/write/seek times doesn't mean its faster?
Click to expand...

First....
Nobody has ever saturated a SATA 150 bus during sustained transfers - burst maybe, not sustained. The 150MB/sec is the the theoretical limit of the bus. The only drive that has come close is the 4GB iRAM solidstate drive.

The numbers on the chart are sustained data transfer rates.

What the chart is showing is that a 36GB Raptor is slower that a 160GB Maxtor during sustained transfers. It does have faster seek times, but it just can't sustain the data rate. This is why nobody recommends the purchase of the 36GB Raptor, you can get a bigger, faster drive for the same amount of money.

Now, the 74GB Raptor owns just about everything else, except for the MAU u320 SCSI drives and the Hitachi 7K500 and it's close to them. And it beats the 7K500 in some tests - check out the stats

For what Ivo wants to do it would be cheaper and faster to get 1 74GB Raptor and 1 of the 250-300GB 16MB cache drives, like the Maxtor. The 1 74BG Raptor is $133.00 right now after discounts and rebates - http://www.hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=976973

And a Maxtor 300 is $121.50 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144186

Thats $254.50 for the 2 drives verses $330.50 for Ivo's method. $76.00 cheaper and a lot faster. With the same amount of space.

I didn't include S&H.....

Hope this helps.


 
So, back to the topic of setting up games on a seperate drive: Is that even possible really?

I have my OS on a 74gb Raptor, and have my games on a 250gb WD. The idea is to be able to do do a clean install of Windows XP when things eventually start slowing down without having to install 10+ games (plus updates, mods, tweaked settings). However, I'm starting to think that this won't actually work. Don't certain game files get loaded onto the various system setting, dll, registry and other Windows folders?

If I reformat and reinstall, will the games on a seperate drive still work?
 
Some games will, some will not. It depends alot on the game. The main upside is you typically don't lose any save files, or configs you have for the game, making reinstall MUCH easier.
 
Can't I do the same thing if I have the OS on a partition on the Raptor. Format only that 20GB partition?

So if my games are on that other partition, some games just won't work after I format the OS. They'll only be partially installed, can I just uninstall them at that point and start over, or will they even be recognized?
 
runLoganrun said:
Can't I do the same thing if I have the OS on a partition on the Raptor. Format only that 20GB partition?

So if my games are on that other partition, some games just won't work after I format the OS. They'll only be partially installed, can I just uninstall them at that point and start over, or will they even be recognized?
Click to expand...

Basically what I do is keep my games on a separate partition from the OS, that way I can format the OS and reinstall without affecting the games.

Then, when windows is back on, I see which games will start up and play fine. The ones that don't get reinstalled.
 
winston856 said:
Basically what I do is keep my games on a separate partition from the OS, that way I can format the OS and reinstall without affecting the games.

Then, when windows is back on, I see which games will start up and play fine. The ones that don't get reinstalled.
Click to expand...

Considering, the way that the registry is used by any program (even games). Very few will work just fine.

Like defacto said, the major advantage is not loosing your saves and config data.

Most likely you'll have to reinstall the game just to get it to run properly - then you'll be abel to copy over the saved data from the old install directory.


 
winston856 said:
Here's my task manager:

tm1yx.png




I've only had windows loaded for about 10mins.
Click to expand...
I think that's too many processes for 10mins into Windows. IMO
 
Slider19 said:
I think that's too many processes for 10mins into Windows. IMO
Click to expand...

It depends on what background stuff he has loading.

If he has any number of taskbar apps or even some of the different anti-virus programs running in the background it could do this.

Also, if he's letting windows manage his pagefile, it will pick a minimium amount of space and use it all, even if nothing is in it.

 
rodsfree said:
Most likely you'll have to reinstall the game just to get it to run properly - then you'll be abel to copy over the saved data from the old install directory.


Click to expand...

If I reinstall it at that point though, doesn't it just re-write the save file anyway? I mean, it doesn't make a new file and leave the old one from which to copy from, right?
 
Sorry I'm late posting this, but there's a tool to defrag the pagefile, works nicely, but it seems to work best when you run this right after a fresh install of windows, then make the pagefile static.pagedfrag It's also better to run this after a fresh install, and setting the pagefile static in order to move it to the inside tracks of the HD to make access faster.

As for seeing how much memory you're using, there's another little app called memstatus that makes it easier to read than through task manager.memstatus Granted you can't see the pagefile usage, but at least you have an idea of how much RAM you're using given whatever apps you're running.
 
rodsfree said:
Considering, the way that the registry is used by any program (even games). Very few will work just fine.

Like defacto said, the major advantage is not loosing your saves and config data.

Most likely you'll have to reinstall the game just to get it to run properly - then you'll be abel to copy over the saved data from the old install directory.
Click to expand...
In my personal experience, depending on the developer, some games will work without reinstall and others won't.

If a game is well programmed, and designed to not depend on the windows systems to work, it will most definitely work. Most games that I have tried this with will regenerate their registry keys on load, or simply do not need them.

The most common reasons for a game to require an installation are copy protection mechanisms. (Going by my experience)
 
rodsfree said:
Also, if he's letting windows manage his pagefile, it will pick a minimium amount of space and use it all, even if nothing is in it.
Click to expand...

I have my page file on my storage 250GB HDD and it's set at 1024initial 3072Max.
 
I have css on my 80gb SATA II drive. I'm always in the servers faster than most people. Sometimes I go through a whole bot round and people wonder how I get an automatic weapon.
 
serbiaNem said:
I have css on my 80gb SATA II drive. I'm always in the servers faster than most people. Sometimes I go through a whole bot round and people wonder how I get an automatic weapon.
Click to expand...
I would bet that's from the 2GB of RAM you have installed.
 
clarkkent333 said:
I always thought it was best to have a set pagefile size. Anyone?
Click to expand...

I did custom set mine. It was 1532 initial 3072max, I just set the initial at 1024 and kept the max the same.

I have it on a freaking 250GB HDD, so I think I can have a max of 3GB's and not worry too much ;)
 
winston856 said:
I did custom set mine. It was 1532 initial 3072max, I just set the initial at 1024 and kept the max the same.

I have it on a freaking 250GB HDD, so I think I can have a max of 3GB's and not worry too much ;)
Click to expand...

What I meant by "set" was an equal min and max. Basically taking the decision out of Windows' hands.
 
clarkkent333 said:
What I meant by "set" was an equal min and max. Basically taking the decision out of Windows' hands.
Click to expand...

I heard that method was from the old days and wasn't nescessary anymore....
 
clarkkent333 said:
What I meant by "set" was an equal min and max. Basically taking the decision out of Windows' hands.
Click to expand...

It's still being done.....

The primary reason is to prevent fragmentation of the pagefile.
If the pagefile can't change size then it can't fragment. And there aren't too many apps that will defrag the pagefile.

In fact the recommended procedure to defrag the pagefile is to disable virtual memory, which will let you delete the pagefile.sys file. Defrag your hard drive. Then re-enable virtual memory with the min/max the same - this is also called setting a 'static' pagefile. One of the benefits of this is that windows will locate the pagefile at the end of the disk - where the hard drive access speeds are faster.

 
Considering 3.0gb/s is only the interface speed...pretty much the same as with current 1.5gb/s sata channels. Though some of the newer 7200 rpm drives are getting much closer in performance to the raptor.
 
Clicky - the main thing to look for to get good performance from a 7200RPM drive is a 16MB buffer. Note that the 7K500 takes 3 of the 5 SR desktop tests in the comparison above (WD740GD included), despite being limited by 7200RPM and having 50% higher seek times.

Smaller drives like the WD2500KS, MaxLineIII, and Hitachi T7K250 don't come quite as close to the WD740GD as the titans in the comparison, but they are much closer to the WD740GD than the 7200RPM drives that were available when WD740GD was released.
 
DougLite said:
Clicky - the main thing to look for to get good performance from a 7200RPM drive is a 16MB buffer. Note that the 7K500 takes 3 of the 5 SR desktop tests in the comparison above (WD740GD included), despite being limited by 7200RPM and having 50% higher seek times.

Smaller drives like the WD2500KS, MaxLineIII, and Hitachi T7K250 don't come quite as close to the WD740GD as the titans in the comparison, but they are much closer to the WD740GD than the 7200RPM drives that were available when WD740GD was released.
Click to expand...

Which adds up to WD having to release a new version of the Raptor if they want to maintain first place in the SATA hard drive competition.

If WD, using their existing technology, created a 10,000 rpm drive with the 16MB cache being used on some of their drives with high density platters - they would keep first place.
They could even just use a single high density platter - say a 125GB or 133GB disk.
And this is technology that they already have, it just needs to be intergrated.

I'm basically asking for a 10,000rpm version of the WD2500KS or WD4000KD.

Plus, the cost of the 74GB Raptors would drop considerably when they released a new Raptor. ;)




 
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