Mistyk
04-29-2003, 12:40 PM
Would it be a waste of money (not a huge price difference, but still) to get two small (18 GB) drives instead of a single large (36 GB) one? Is there likely to be enough simultaneous access to warrant independent drives?
A major decisive factor is noise and heat. The 36 GB Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 is rated as outputting 32 dB, which is slightly higher than the 31 dB of the 18 GB model. However, two small 31 dB drives should at least in theory double the total sound pressure, which ought to increase the noise rating by approximately 3 dB. Thus two small drives should be slightly noisier (34 dB) than one large drive (32 dB). These numbers are of course theoretical, so I wonder if anyone has real-world experiences which lend credence to the theory?
As for temperatures, are two small drives likely to generate substantially more heat than one large drive?
Which, if any, of the four "data types" (OS, applications, pagefile and games) would benefit from being separated? Are there any rules of thumb, suggesting that for example the pagefile should always be separated from the OS or the like?
There's also a large IDE data drive present, which is why the Cheetah(s) shouldn't have to be huge.
Two GB of RAM might contribute to lessening the paging to disk. Would any improvements in performance and/or responsiveness, resulting from the use of two independent Cheetahs, be too slight to be noticable? What would you do?
Is the OS only read/written at bootup/shutdown, or are DLLs etc. constantly accessed during normal operation? How about applications, are they only read/written at launch and then stored in RAM? Or are libraries and/or executables automatically paged out to disk when not in use, despite abundance of RAM? Would it help to have a pagefile on a RAM disk, aside from the oblgatory pagefile residing on a harddrive?
The main purpose of the IDE drive is to house a backup of the SCSI drive(s), lots of large (~10 MB) still animation frames, as well as Huffyuv and MPEG2 compressed completed animations. Thus the IDE drive will be heavily accessed when compositing (using the still frames) and when playing back video streams. I don't think it would be wise to put a pagefile on the IDE drive. Or would Windows' "adaptive paging distribution" be smart enough to choose a pagefile on a SCSI drive when the IDE drive is busy? I know it does in theory, but does it work well enough for the risk of interrupting a real-time video-stream from the IDE drive to be minimal? The reasoning provides that there are at least two pagefiles; one on the IDE drive and one on a SCSI drive.
As for the sizes of the OS, applications, pagefile and games:
-Don't know how much space WinXP Pro occupies.
-Apps can probably fit in around 10 GB.
-Four GB pagefile.
-Games don't have to be on the Cheetahs, but any space that's left could be filled with a couple of games.
Is there a point in enabling system restore for all drives, as opposed to only for the OS drive? Is the required space, for the system restore files, a significant percentage of the size of all data on the drive?
If numerous pagefiles are used, is it advisable/necessary for the sum of their sizes to be below the maximum allowed pagefile size (4 GB I think)?
Thank you in advance and sorry for the long post!
A major decisive factor is noise and heat. The 36 GB Seagate Cheetah 15k.3 is rated as outputting 32 dB, which is slightly higher than the 31 dB of the 18 GB model. However, two small 31 dB drives should at least in theory double the total sound pressure, which ought to increase the noise rating by approximately 3 dB. Thus two small drives should be slightly noisier (34 dB) than one large drive (32 dB). These numbers are of course theoretical, so I wonder if anyone has real-world experiences which lend credence to the theory?
As for temperatures, are two small drives likely to generate substantially more heat than one large drive?
Which, if any, of the four "data types" (OS, applications, pagefile and games) would benefit from being separated? Are there any rules of thumb, suggesting that for example the pagefile should always be separated from the OS or the like?
There's also a large IDE data drive present, which is why the Cheetah(s) shouldn't have to be huge.
Two GB of RAM might contribute to lessening the paging to disk. Would any improvements in performance and/or responsiveness, resulting from the use of two independent Cheetahs, be too slight to be noticable? What would you do?
Is the OS only read/written at bootup/shutdown, or are DLLs etc. constantly accessed during normal operation? How about applications, are they only read/written at launch and then stored in RAM? Or are libraries and/or executables automatically paged out to disk when not in use, despite abundance of RAM? Would it help to have a pagefile on a RAM disk, aside from the oblgatory pagefile residing on a harddrive?
The main purpose of the IDE drive is to house a backup of the SCSI drive(s), lots of large (~10 MB) still animation frames, as well as Huffyuv and MPEG2 compressed completed animations. Thus the IDE drive will be heavily accessed when compositing (using the still frames) and when playing back video streams. I don't think it would be wise to put a pagefile on the IDE drive. Or would Windows' "adaptive paging distribution" be smart enough to choose a pagefile on a SCSI drive when the IDE drive is busy? I know it does in theory, but does it work well enough for the risk of interrupting a real-time video-stream from the IDE drive to be minimal? The reasoning provides that there are at least two pagefiles; one on the IDE drive and one on a SCSI drive.
As for the sizes of the OS, applications, pagefile and games:
-Don't know how much space WinXP Pro occupies.
-Apps can probably fit in around 10 GB.
-Four GB pagefile.
-Games don't have to be on the Cheetahs, but any space that's left could be filled with a couple of games.
Is there a point in enabling system restore for all drives, as opposed to only for the OS drive? Is the required space, for the system restore files, a significant percentage of the size of all data on the drive?
If numerous pagefiles are used, is it advisable/necessary for the sum of their sizes to be below the maximum allowed pagefile size (4 GB I think)?
Thank you in advance and sorry for the long post!