Good Performance Hunting

[z929669]

I wrote about this a while back in these forums I believe, best harddrive setup is 3 ssd's, 1: windows system, 2: boot files, temp files, and pagefiles, 3:games and intensive applications

Then have a couple 2TB hds for all the rest. Totally eliminates the fragmentation issues (and thus maintenance), and isolates the 3 systems that use hd the most so you don't have performance drops from competing demands. The same idea would apply to any 3 hd's, if you only have 2 you'll have to make some hard choices.

 

 

+1, even better

 

 

 

I have a 2x RAID0 config (with partitions), so effectively only 2 drives. I'd like to get an teeny-tiny SSD for #2 above. Actually, I'd like 3 SSDs, but my mobo only supports 3 Gb/s theoretical transfer rate (I assume my board supports SSD natively or with BIOS update). This is still a very fast transfer rate, but I assume that it referrs to the entire BUS and not each SATA port. Any input on 3 Gb/s transfer rate & SSD, Fri?

[frihyland]

I see, for your particular situation I would keep windows system and game files on the fast drive and offload everything else to the slower drive.

[Vond]

Yeah that's what I've been doing currently, I keep OS and games on that drive and dump everything I download to the other drive. So with the specs there, would you recommend using the slower drive as pagefile dump aswell or just keep it on the OS drive? Heard some people kept like 300mb pagefile on OS and then a proper system-managed pagefile on another drive etc but there are so many things being said about pagefiles on the net that are just comletely wrong that it's hard to know

[z929669]

I see, for your particular situation I would keep windows system and game files on the fast drive and offload everything else to the slower drive.

 

 

Both are very fast, so I am maxed already. Just want to know about SSDs, and if it is worth purchase, given my 3 Gb/s constraint.

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EDIT: I guess I responded to a post meant for Vond, so disregard above gibberish

[frihyland]

3GB or 6GB is not that big a deal, what you want to check you motherboard for is Native AHCI, if your motherboard doesn't have it your ssd's will be running in simulated IDE mode.

[frihyland]

Yeah that's what I've been doing currently, I keep OS and games on that drive and dump everything I download to the other drive. So with the specs there, would you recommend using the slower drive as pagefile dump aswell or just keep it on the OS drive? Heard some people kept like 300mb pagefile on OS and then a proper system-managed pagefile on another drive etc but there are so many things being said about pagefiles on the net that are just comletely wrong that it's hard to know

 

 

you should be able to find an old 20GB ssd for around $30 online, same caveat with AHCI though. Otherwise use the slower drive for your pagefile and temp files.

[z929669]

OK, good. AHCI is not a problem for my board, just wanted to be sure I was not bottlenecking an SSD

[z929669]

I wrote about this a while back in these forums I believe, best harddrive setup is 3 ssd's, 1: windows system, 2: boot files, temp files, and pagefiles, 3:games and intensive applications

Then have a couple 2TB hds for all the rest. Totally eliminates the fragmentation issues (and thus maintenance), and isolates the 3 systems that use hd the most so you don't have performance drops from competing demands. The same idea would apply to any 3 hd's, if you only have 2 you'll have to make some hard choices.

 

 

Would appreciate a tried & True methodology for getting Windows Boot & Temp files to be maintained on a partition apart from the OS partition.

[Vond]

 

Yeah that's what I've been doing currently, I keep OS and games on that drive and dump everything I download to the other drive. So with the specs there, would you recommend using the slower drive as pagefile dump aswell or just keep it on the OS drive? Heard some people kept like 300mb pagefile on OS and then a proper system-managed pagefile on another drive etc but there are so many things being said about pagefiles on the net that are just comletely wrong that it's hard to know

 

 

you should be able to find an old 20GB ssd for around $30 online, same caveat with AHCI though. Otherwise use the slower drive for your pagefile and temp files.

 

Thanks, I have no idea about AHCI but can post what it says about storage interfance below. :) I'll look around some for cheap small SSD's, and will put pagefile and temp files on the slow drive

 

 

Chipset:

• 6 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (SATA2_0, SATA2_1, SATA2_2, SATA2_3, SATA2_4, SATA2_5) supporting up to 6 SATA 3Gb/s devices
• Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, and RAID 10

GIGABYTE SATA2 chip:

• 1 x IDE connector supporting ATA-133/100/66/33 and up to 2 IDE devices
• 2 x SATA 3Gb/s connectors (GSATA2_6, GSATA2_7) supporting up to 2 SATA 3Gb/s devices
• Support for SATA RAID 0, RAID 1, and JBOD

iTE IT8720 chip:

• 1 x floppy disk drive connector supporting up to 1 floppy disk drive

[z929669]

Vond, your board supports Advanced Host Controller Interface. All P55 chipsets should. That board basically has the same config as mine.

[Vond]

Vond, your board supports Advanced Host Controller Interface. All P55 chipsets should. That board basically has the same config as mine.

 

 

Alright cheers, good to know if/when I find an SSD!

[frihyland]

You will have to turn it on in the bios though, it is always off by default.

[z929669]

On my board, the BIOS guide indicates that when RAID is enabled, ACHI is turned on by default as well. I have three settings 1) IDE, 2) ACHI & 3) RAID

[stoppingby4now]

The bit about moving game and steam off of the OS drive makes good sense if pagefile.sys is located on the OS drive or yet another drive... does Skyrim page out by default or does it try to stay in system RAM??Anyway, that poster's comment about "if you are running out of VRAM on your GPU..." makes no sense unless he is using this as a proxy to conclude that paging occurs at VRAM max (which also does not make sense to me).

Any comments on these observations?

 

Applications can force data to the pagefile, and some actually require it to exist for this purpose. When profiling Skyrim, there are threads that are accessing the pagefile. Not a lot, but it's being used for something, there's just no way it's being used for textures.

[stoppingby4now]

I wrote about this a while back in these forums I believe, best harddrive setup is 3 ssd's, 1: windows system, 2: boot files, temp files, and pagefiles, 3:games and intensive applications

Then have a couple 2TB hds for all the rest. Totally eliminates the fragmentation issues (and thus maintenance), and isolates the 3 systems that use hd the most so you don't have performance drops from competing demands. The same idea would apply to any 3 hd's, if you only have 2 you'll have to make some hard choices.

 

I would agree with that setup with hard drives, but you only need two SSD's in the above scenario by combining 1 and 2. A quality synchronous SSD is blazing fast, and you won't notice any real measurable difference by separating those two options. It absolutely makes sense to do this with hard drives due to their requirement of slow moving metal.