OMG look at this noob.........

[Mayhs]

Got your attention? good

ive got a few questoins to ask which are pretty noobish but i guess if you dont ask you dont learn...

1)for a gaming comp ois it better to have only one hard drive over 2? currently ive got 2 hard drives as you can see in my sig but my friend told me one big hard drive is better..is this true?
2)If i have windows on its own isolated hard drive will it boot quicker?

and a few other questions that i cant think off

Thnx
Mayhs

 

[roninblade]

2 drives will use more resources but it should be fine, and yes to question number 2

 

[Sunin]

Fastest option would be twin Raptor 150's unless you go SCSI... Set one up as windows loader and such and other just to handle the game.

Sunin

 

[Mayhs]

not gna buy 2 150 gig raptors tho

how much quicker would the isolated drive allow me to boot windows?

 

[MrE]

Hmm, well, I use my OS and programs on one drive (74Gb Raptor) and games, storage, etc.. on the large 400Gb drive. It does not take up more resources other than an additional power plug and an additional SATA or IDE connector which your OS already has loaded drivers for.

Having one big drive means that when it goes south, it takes not only your OS out, but all your other files. having two drives gives you better odds that you can recover one or the other. As far as speed, I believe it has more to do with the speed of the individual drive then whether or not you cram everyting on one.
If you are doing video, then yes, there is an advantage of having two drives. Your program would run on your OS drive, and your video captures would happen on the storage drive. It reduces the inturrupting that needs to be done when capturing. Thus cutting down the audio/video out of sync issues many video capture programs incur.

-E

 

[Mayhs]

Hmm, well, I use my OS and programs on one drive (74Gb Raptor) and games, storage, etc.. on the large 400Gb drive. It does not take up more resources other than an additional power plug and an additional SATA or IDE connector which your OS already has loaded drivers for.

Having one big drive means that when it goes south, it takes not only your OS out, but all your other files. having two drives gives you better odds that you can recover one or the other. As far as speed, I believe it has more to do with the speed of the individual drive then whether or not you cram everyting on one.
If you are doing video, then yes, there is an advantage of having two drives. Your program would run on your OS drive, and your video captures would happen on the storage drive. It reduces the inturrupting that needs to be done when capturing. Thus cutting down the audio/video out of sync issues many video capture programs incur.

-E

Thnx...

how much quicker would the isolated drive allow me to boot windows?

 

[mikeblas]

The idea behind using more than one drive in any particular application is that you can split I/O requests across the multiple drives and let them complete quicker. Sometimes, it's not possible to initiate multiple concurrent requests: all further processing might be waiting on the data that's about to come into memory, so one I/O request might block any further progress.

While loading Windows, you're doing lots of I/O and most of it is short and random. And most of it is blocking because processing can't continue until the I/O request is satisfied.

Do you see a way to have Windows do multiple concurrent I/Os across two or more drives when booting? I don't think there's an easy way to do this -- at least, not one that's worth the trouble.

2 drives will use more resources but it should be fine, and yes to question number 2

How would you make it work, roninblade? What operations do you think will become concurrent?

 

[Mayhs]

none of my drives are in raid theyre just plugged in if that helps

 

[Sunin]

Thnx...

how much quicker would the isolated drive allow me to boot windows?

Isolated drive will not affect windows boot up... what it will do is allow windows files to be read at the same time as your game files giving you better overall performance in gaming!

Sunin

 

[Mayhs]

Isolated drive will not affect windows boot up... what it will do is allow windows files to be read at the same time as your game files giving you better overall performance in gaming!

Sunin

ooooh kk thnx

and this percentage would be how much on average? *coross fingers for 100 *

 

[mikeblas]

Isolated drive will not affect windows boot up... what it will do is allow windows files to be read at the same time as your game files giving you better overall performance in gaming!

How often does that happen during gaming? I'm afraid the answer is "between very rarely and not at all".

 

[haste]

the only time a game would need something from windows is the swap file. what is the game gonna read from windows? only thing it needs are the game files themselves. drivers etc. already loaded when windows boots up. main windows drive is also my games drive(raptor 150gb.) i have my swap file on a seperate drive. i doubt you will see much performance increase from totally seperating games/windows drive as long as u keep the swap file on a seperate hard drive. the obvious best solution is to have a drive for windows. a drive for ur games. and a drive for your swap file.

 

[Dumass_Freakboy]

Like meeeeeeeeeeeeee 4 Drives - 1 for Windows - one for apps & pagefile - 2 for games (all 9.1GB scsi).

For reference.... this set-up won't decrease your boot time much, maybe by 5 seconds or so (mynes the same as it was before scsi). It is good for multi-tasking. Say for instance you are copying a dvd to your drive & playing a game at the same time.

Seperating stuff works good for games with large textures which are hi-res and require in-game loading, such as WoW (why i made my setup - i get no slow-downs wherever, when playing the game - WoW will load textures in real time when playing the game - as well as at the start). For games such as CS:S or Farcry, it might improve performance slightly (anywhere between 1% - 3%) when there are textures being loaded (during level loads - you would get into games a little bit faster than other people)

 

[mikeblas]

the obvious best solution is to have a drive for windows. a drive for ur games. and a drive for your swap file.

I'm not sure that's such a great solution. If you don't have a swapfile on your system drive, your ability to collect a dump file is compromised. There's a zillion threads on this in the OS section, but it's really rare that you hit the swapfile anyway... if you're running low on memory, you should sell or trade the drive to get money for more memory.

But I certainly agree about the rest of the analysis.

For games such as CS:S or Farcry, it might improve performance slightly (anywhere between 1% - 3%) when there are textures being loaded (during level loads - you would get into games a little bit faster than other people)

I can't imagine how. Is your assertion that Farcry is loading into memory from its level files while at the same time causing memory pressure which makes Windows push other stuff out to the page file?

 

[Sunin]

ooooh kk thnx

and this percentage would be how much on average? *coross fingers for 100 *

No your looking at a 5-15% difference is all. Thnk of it this way... Your comp can better multitask loading O/S data and swap file performance by having that data on seperate drive then what the game is.

Sunin

 

[Dumass_Freakboy]

I'm not sure that's such a great solution. If you don't have a swapfile on your system drive, your ability to collect a dump file is compromised. There's a zillion threads on this in the OS section, but it's really rare that you hit the swapfile anyway... if you're running low on memory, you should sell or trade the drive to get money for more memory.

But I certainly agree about the rest of the analysis.


I can't imagine how. Is your assertion that Farcry is loading into memory from its level files while at the same time causing memory pressure which makes Windows push other stuff out to the page file?

I am saying that, when you load a game, say from windows. It will first load the menus and anything else it needs. (with a faster HD or faster way to access the data - the time to get to this screen will decrease slightly)
Once you press the "New Game" button or whatever there is to start a new game, and the moment you see a load screen, or you hear your hard drive begin to thrash - you then access data off your hard drive - and if you have a faster drive, or if say your windows drive was also accessing something else - say you had a bittorrent downloading in the background - then you might notice an increase in "lag". By this i mean not slowdowns in framerate (it may look this way) but time it takes to load the textures. This will look like the game is freezing altogether - but in reality it is the hard drive which is the limiting factor.

In World of Warcraft. You have the level load screen. What is being loaded here is the main town/city/locations textures where you last left the game. Once you get into the game, textures for characters armor, and mounts and some items in the world will then get loaded. With 200 people in iron forge (and you appearing there), this can really slow down a computer, especially if you are doing something else in the background. Hence SCSI/RAID for WoW because your gaming will not be limited by a slow hard drive not able to access the textures fast enough to be read into the memory & graphics card. This will appear to be a slowdown of the graphics card because the game appears to freeze for a moment, or look like it's stuttering - but in WoW it's far more likely that it's your hard drive loading the textures as you enter Iron Forge and load the textures of 1000 different armors and weapons.

I merely stated FarCry because it has large textures, and game load times. I have not played the game for more than 30 minutes, and it's a FPS and it seems to be quite popular at this moment in time. Hence my response. The pagefile is there incase you run out of system ram. However windows doesn't always use all of your system ram, it will use the pagefile despite how much ram you have. Right now, I have 512MB of ram in the PC i'm using right now... IE is using 40MB of memory - and 27MB of pagefile. Why is that? Because Microsoft designed IE, and for whatever reasons (i can guess - but i'd rather not cuz more people would then start asking more questions), they designed it so that windows will use a pagefile as well as the ram.

 

[ScHpAnKy]

I've tried one drive, two drives, three drives... raid 0, 1, 0+1, and 5... you know what performance difference there was?

none.

Best bet, get a huge drive, make a small windows partition (6GB is much much more than "enough") and make another partition that takes up the rest of the drive.

After that, kill everything known to man to increase performance.

 

[Dumass_Freakboy]

I must agree with ScHpAnKy completely - unless you play games where you know you have times in-game where it loads alot of stuff off the hard drive - and this would deteriorate from the game-playing experience. WoW is a good example.

 

[mikeblas]

I am saying that, when you load a game, say from windows. It will first load the menus and anything else it needs. (with a faster HD or faster way to access the data - the time to get to this screen will decrease slightly)
Once you press the "New Game" button or whatever there is to start a new game, and the moment you see a load screen, or you hear your hard drive begin to thrash - you then access data off your hard drive - and if you have a faster drive, or if say your windows drive was also accessing something else - say you had a bittorrent downloading in the background - then you might notice an increase in "lag".

Then isn't the solution to put your torrents on a different drive than the games? The scenario you're describing has has nothing to do with anything loading from Windows.

However windows doesn't always use all of your system ram, it will use the pagefile despite how much ram you have.

This simply isn't true. I think you're confusing reserving pagefile space with actually using the page file by swapping to it.

 

[Slartibartfast]

My comp here at work is using 400 mb of ram (out of 1g), and 346 mb of the pagefile (out of 2g). So windows uses the page file even when there's available system memory.

 

[mikeblas]

My comp here at work is using 400 mb of ram (out of 1g), and 346 mb of the pagefile (out of 2g). So windows uses the page file even when there's available system memory.

How are you measuring the pagefile usage? By looking at the "Performance" tab in Task Manager? Those graphs show the amount of page file that's been reserved in the event that something needs to be swapped -- it isn't indicative of anything having ever been swapped to the page file.

 

[Slartibartfast]

How are you measuring the pagefile usage? By looking at the "Performance" tab in Task Manager? Those graphs show the amount of page file that's been reserved in the event that something needs to be swapped -- it isn't indicative of anything having ever been swapped to the page file.

Yeah, I just looked at the "PF Usage" thing. Interestingly, since I last posted, the available system memory has gone down and the pf up, which makes sense (I have opened more programs since my last posting). The PF usage history is flat though. So 370mb of the PF have been reserved, but the total pf file is set to 1500 min/max (thought it was 2gb). Why would it "reserve" only part of the pf when the pf is a constant size?

 

[mikeblas]

Why would it "reserve" only part of the pf when the pf is a constant size?

In a nutshell, the reservation indicates where a page would land in the PF if it were to be swapped out of physical memory. The reservation lets the OS track the memory's resting place so that it can efficiently swap the memory out if the time comes to do so.

It's a little too complicated to explain fully in someone else's thread; there are lots of threads in the OS section of the forum that review how it works. You can also get a copy of the Windows Internals book and read that.

The wording in the Task Manager windows is a bit unfortunate; it was an attempt to make user-friendly some terms which otherwise are confusing and deep. It hasn't worked out that way, and I expect to see the wording (or the numbers) change by the time Vista ships.

For now, lots of people believe that Windows is "using" the PF. I guess, strictly, it is -- but it does not actively swap to the PF until there's memory pressure. As a result, moving the PF to a different drive only wins you something if there was actually paging happening. It's good to move that I/O to a different spindle, but it's far better to get some more physical memory and stop the swapping.

If someone thinks that putting the PF on another disk will help FarCry load levels faster, they're saying that they think FarCry is causing Windows to swap memory to the page file while it is loading. It isn't doing so, unless you have painfully little memory.

Interestingly, since I last posted, the available system memory has gone down and the pf up, which makes sense (I have opened more programs since my last posting).

It generally makes sense, though PF reservation and available memory usage totals aren't directly related.

An application can allocate memory that isn't backed by the page file. It might create a mapping over a file -- called a memory mapped file -- and that memory is backed by the file involved, not the PF. The OS loads program images (DLLs and EXEs) as memory mapped files, so their pages are backed by the executable file and not the PF. These items take memory and count against the available system memory total, but don't cause a reservation of space in the PF.

 

[Dumass_Freakboy]

Ok, well now that I've been told....
I have thought about what you've said. I saw the PF numbers in the task manager before, and it didn't always seem to add up. My system wouldn't always be accessing the HD when there was data in the PF, but when I first played the alpha Doom 3, and my "memory" usage shot up to 1.5GB... I was stunned. By memory... I was looking at the graph in the task manager - so really the Pagefile

Anyhow - I have 1GB of ram in my system - so not exactly 2GB. I run my system with a pagefile on a second drive just for those times when I play a game and it does access the page file - it will be accessing a seperate drive from the drive it is currently loading the textures. I run WoW at 1920x1200 with al of the textures on pretty high - so I do use a ton of ram when playing WoW - and it routinely goes above 1GB. I love the game - Just not enough time or money with the gf
I would get more ram but meh

But after our through pagefile hijacking.... I hope our threadstarter got the answers he wanted & learned a little something about windows' pagefile

 

[Mayhs]

yeh thnx for the help i got most of the answers...

another question though, will windows boot slower if there are more things on the harddrive (more space taken up)

 

[mikeblas]

another question though, will windows boot slower if there are more things on the harddrive (more space taken up)

More space used might imply more fragmentation, which might make Windows boot slower.

If there's more space used and all other things are equal, no: Windows will boot at the same speed. Try it yourself:

1) Boot, timing it.
2) create a very large file: 30 gigabytes, say.
3) Boot again, timing it.

Were the times in #3 and #1 different? I'm sure you'll find that the answer is no.

 

[Mayhs]

More space used might imply more fragmentation, which might make Windows boot slower.

If there's more space used and all other things are equal, no: Windows will boot at the same speed. Try it yourself:

1) Boot, timing it.
2) create a very large file: 30 gigabytes, say.
3) Boot again, timing it.

Were the times in #3 and #1 different? I'm sure you'll find that the answer is no.

kk...thnx i believe you

 

[Dumass_Freakboy]

Though, I have in the past found that when a hard drive fills over 80% the speed seems to slow... slow access times, slower read times.. but i'm sure it's the fragmentation.

There may be no direct correlation between space available on the drive and speed, but indirect, with other factors, yes.

 

[haste]

W
T
F

were u searching for to come across this thread?

Its only 5 months old...

 

[xLiquidx]

So basically you guys are saying OS, drivers, and other programs on one drive. Storage on another? Or storage and programs on another and drivers / OS on one isolated.