Hardware Suggestion

  • Thread starter Thread starter amerar
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A

amerar

Hi All,

I'm looking for some suggestions here. I want to speed up my
applications. I have 2 drives in my system, both 500GB.

All my apps are installed on my Apps partition. When I load more than
one application at a time, things really come to a crawl.

I have the following hardware:

AMD 64 x2 Dual Core 4400
ASUS A8N SLI Deluxe
1 GB Corsair memory

Some people have suggested splitting up my apps partition over 2
drives, others have suggested RAID.

I'm lost there, because I thought RAID was for backup / recovery
purposes only......

I'm looking for some suggestions to help speed up the loading of my
apps.

Thanks,

Arthur
 
Because you chose to install your applications in a separate partition, the
read/write heads on your hard disk are constantly jumping back and forth
between the system partition and your Apps partition.

It makes no sense to install your applications into a separate partition. It
slows your computer while contributing nothing to the stability or
reliability of your system.

It's arguable whether or not it's ever worthwhile to partition a hard disk,
but those who do - including yours truly - do it to separate user files
(docs, spreadsheets, photos, etc.) from the system (OS and applications) for
convenience in backing up and restoring.
 
Your OS and applications have no business on a 500 GB drive, if you're
looking for speed. Place both your OS and your applications on a smaller,
faster drive.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=65
The above link is to a 74 GB Raptor drive that spins at 10,000 RPM. This
would be ideal for your OS and applications. The large 500 GB drives are
fine for static data (movies, music, documents, photos), but a smaller,
faster drive is preferrable for your OS and applications, in my opinion.

While your 1 GB of RAM should be sufficient, you can always add more.
 
What about RAID? Lots of people are taling about it, although I always
though of RAID as a disaster recovery step, not an additional drive to
perform simultaneous read/write..........
 
MaximumPC did a study that concluded the RAID with two drives is NOT faster
than a single fast drive. The RAID that uses 5 (or is it 6?) drives is
faster, but my, how expensive.
 
3rd party apps should be installed on the default system partition period.

RAID makes use of simultaneous use of multiple hard disks. In some cases
use of multiple disks by the operating system, and in others as a mirror
drive invisible to the OS. Have a look at RAID 0 and RAID 1 for starters
with Google. Then find the differences between hardware and software RAID.
 
Hardware RAID 0 is faster than one single ide hard drive, using the same
identical hard drives on RAID 0.
 
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