Performnace laptop and RAID, the way to go?

I am looking for a really powerfull laptop mainly for heavy load work, like software development etc. Naturally, going for the fastest CPU and 4GB of RAM is quite obvious, but isnt the HD(s) really as important as these two in real life?

If you like me have Windows task manager as a startup program (in order to kill all processes going wild and failing all the time) you will notice that it is very rare to see the CPU at 100% load, or even close to it. Often you will find that the laptop feels very slugish, but the CPU is working at less than 25%. I havn't really looked into it, by the obvious answer that comes to mind is that is must be the HD that is the bottleneck in my system, and many other systems as well, and because of this, your fine CPU and enormous memory might not be all it could be, true?

Now, if this is infact true, and one is looking for a performance laptop, should I go for a RAID 0 solution? What kind of performance increase would one normally see in real life applications going from a 7200 RPM to a RAID 0 setup (not looking for exact figures here, rather something like "a lot", "almost nothing" or similar). What laptops out there are the which can support harware based RAID 0?

/pJ

 

If you PC is feeling sluggish. Check a few things. Are you running out of memory and using the HD as virtual RAM? Do you have a graphics card that use system memory? Although your CPU is not at 100% is any process taking a large load. The PC can feel sluggish with plenty of CPU power left if all the varies processes is taking up priority and wait states. The only way to say that this is caused by the HD is if the HD activity light is constantly on during these periods.

Although I have used Raid 0 on my last 5 desktop, I would not recommend doing RAID on a laptop. Raid ) usually only helps on bootup and loading of large application and files and may only have an 5%-10% overall impact on the average performance. Laptop drive already have a lower reliability factor than desktop 3.5". A Raid 0 setup on top of that is just a bit risky IMHO.

 

The HDD is indeed just as important as the processor and memory with regard to the overall performance of a computer. In fact, the HDD is the bottleneck to almost every system on the market right now. This is pretty clear if you consider that memory throughout is measured in GB/s and HDD throughput is measured in MB/s.

That being said, I don't think RAID is the answer, especially RAID 0. http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=239222. You get a measly performance boost and twice the drive failure rate, not to mention it can be a hassle to setup and maintain. Furthermore, the only laptops that support two or more drives are 17+ inch behemoths which I would not want to lug around.

If you really want a performance hard drive, get an MTRON SSD. Those things are beasts. Throughput is significantly faster than some desktop 7200rpm drives and the seek time is nonexistent. Yes they cost a lot, yes they're hard to find, yes you will have cheaper options in a year, but that's what you want if you want a real performance drive right now.

Otherwise just settle for a typical 5400rpm or 7200rpm drive. Throughput on larger 5400rpm drives is on par with smaller 7200rpm drives, though seek times will be a bit faster on any 7200rpm drive.

 

Raid 0 is one of the most misunderstood things im computer history, so many people jump into raid 0 thinking its a nessisary part of a high end setup and never know that it was a mistake.

That being said raid 0 is good for specific things, like video editing is the one I think of the most. If your going to be working with very large files most of the time then there is definitely a benefit to raid 0, otherwise stay away (or in the case of a desktop another variation of raid 0 that has some redundancy so you wont lose your data in a failure)

 

So, you all seem to agree on RAID 0 being somewhat useless on a laptop and based on the arguments provided, I tend to agree with you. But....do we agree that the HD is usually the bottleneck in a high end laptop? If not, much of the idea behind using SSDs must be wrong, as you pay a higher price for less capacity. Yes, there is the fact of added data protection, but I doubt that is the reason for most SSD buyers.

/pJ

 

Like I said, the HDD is almost always the slowest component in high end laptops. Speedy access times (and sooner or later, fastest throughput) are the main benefits of SSD, but increased reliability (or so they claim) and much higher shock tolerance are other factors which may induce one to buy an SSD over a conventional hard drive. Capacity of SSD is eventually supposed to surpass conventional drives as well, but that might not be for a while...

 

well I switched to RAID 0 and my PCMark05 score rose by 1100pts.

 

And this is one of the main reasons that Raid 0 is so misunderstood because in "theory" its great with nearly 2x the performance but in reality your looking at 5% sometimes, and when working with alot of very small files (well over 90% of the average pc is tons of small files) it could even worsen performance depending on how you setup your stripe size and other factors.