looking for advice...on hdd

alright, the dilemma is this: i want to (at the very least) get a 2nd hdd and run the computer in raid 0. should i go with another WD BEVT 320 gb 5400 rpm, or scrap that idea, and go for the big daddy 7200 rpm (replacing the one that i have in the laptop already, plus 2nd drive)

i'm partial to seagate and wd drives as i've not had a single problem with drives bought from either of these manufacturers, but i am considering hitachi with all the good reviews i've read about them.

 

If you want a raid 0 array, you will need two identical drives.
You can either get a second 320gb wd bevt drive, or you can buy two of the new 320gb 7200rpm drives.

Just so you know, your laptop has a software based raid controller, so the most performance increase you will get from having two of teh drives is 3-8%. It is not 100% faster, as you would think. HDTUNE is a synthetic benchmark, and does not show real life speeds. You will need a laptop with a hardware based raid controller to get 70-80% performance increase out of the second drive. The Clevo D900K and D900T were the only laptops made with a hardware based raid controller.

K-TRON

 

basically making it damn near pointless to have raid in this laptop then?

 

Basically raid 0 in laptops is not worth it, because software raid is horribly inefficient.
If you want, you can use raid 1, which makes a backup of your first drive on a secondary one, or you can put it into spanning mode, so you can use both drives separately.

K-TRON

 

K-TRON, do u know what Raid chipset does D900K use?

 

would that speed up the transfer rates, access times, and all that jazz? i know its a synthetic benchmark (but in the options, you can set it between fast and accurate---i just figured that out) but i set hd tune all the way over to accurate and my min. was 28.X mb/s max was 61.4 avg. 47.9 with access time at 17.3....im looking to speed that up just a little...give it that extra "snappiness" that i like.

 

raid 1 will not offer any faster speeds, your system will run the same speed as it would with a single drive.
If you want a higher hdtune score than you can do raid 0, hdtune will see the bench as 2x as a single drive. However in reality the speed increase is only 3-8%. Boot times may be one second shorter, so if that is worth how ever much a second harddrive costs, than that is up to you.

If you want speed, I would buy an external enclosure, and put your 320gb 5400rpm drive in their. Than buy a 7200rpm 320gb drive as your main harddrive in your laptop.

The D900K uses a VIA K8T890 RAID Chipset
http://www.via.com.tw/en/products/chipsets/k8-series/k8t890/

K-TRON

 

i dont care about benchmark this or benchmark that. just comparing my old toshiba x205 to this computer, it doesnt have the same "snappy" feel to it. exact same processor, same set of ram, same programs installed. just less "snappy" only difference is the operating system (home premium 64 vs ultimate 64)

i guess the question now becomes how much is that "snappy" feel worth to me....

 

What harddrive did you have in the X205?

The 320GB WD BEVT is a very nice drive, but doesn't have the fastest access times. HD Tune result

I once had a Sony TZ with one of the first SSDs. Damn it was snappy, just because of the access times. Transferrates were not that good though.

 

i had a 250gb 5400 rpm hdd in the x205...dont remember what brand though...

 

hmm that should not really be a noticeable difference in acces times ( link). Maybe something else is influencing the 'snappy' feeling.

 

who knows...i just know i want it back. lol. on the x205, the spinning circle on the vista welcome screen would spin 5 times, and then BAM! kaspersky, windows sidebar, logitech setpoint, RMclock, and HWmonitor would all be there. in a blink of an eye. and the network icon would already show the internet is available.

but now, it spins 4 times, loads the desktop, and within 5-20 seconds all that is loaded.

i've already defragged 3 or 4 times using jkdefrag....maybe i need to screw around with that some more...hmm...

 

My guess would be the difference is caused by the different OS + drivers. Not by your HDD.

PS. you could use hibernate instead of booting. this is faster and avoids the long loads of drivers.

 

pwrcfg -h off cures that...i hate hibernation. besides, i rarely restart/shutdown the machine...the "snappy" feeling isnt just lost at boot up...its lost between program responsiveness and just overall-in general. i've got everything tweaked the same way.

 

Is there anyway you could test if it's Vista x64 causing the loss of responsiveness?

I once installed Vista 32bit but I went back to XP, because of the menu latency of Vista.

 

you mean by downgrading? ugh...all the other OS's i have are 32 bit and i dont want to lose the ability to use all 4gb of ram...not to mention this came with home premium 64 installed on it, but i reformatted and did a clean install.

 

well, i went ahead and bought another wd scorpio 320gb 5400 rpm. should be here tuesday along with a new enclosure (that supports e-sata) for my 1TB external drive.

ill post again after installing it and setting up the raid array.