Major Preformance increase (Hard Drive)

[quincy 10]

i have been playing arma 2 co for a while on xp 64bit using 1 80gb ide 7200 rpm hard drive to hold my operating system and loads of other irrelevant files causing the drive to have less than 30gb of free space. arma 2 was installed on a separate 80gb sata 8mb cache 7200 rpm hard drive with arma 2 taking up almost 30gb including many. addons

on this setup i usually played on normal to high settings no Antic Lansing with battles up to about 60 ai and lots of stutter though frame-rates were 25 - 45 depending on how much combat i was in.

my system specs are asus m3nht deluxe

5gb ddr2 800mhz

amd phenom 8750 3 core 2.4 ghz

pny gts 250 1gb gddr3

i restarted my entire setup

i found a 80gb sata 8mb cache 7200 rpm hard drive and installed only windows 7 64bit on it no other programs or files will be stored on this drive therefor leaving the drive witn 54gb free space after installing windows.

i have a 500 gb sata 8mb cache 7200 rpm hard drive with lots of irrelevant files on it but still alot of free space and installed arma 2 co and the I44 mod taking up about 30 gb of space. the drive still has over 200gb of free space and i plan to make more.

i now play battles on high with no shadows or antic Lansing with nearly 250 ai and run it smoothly and no studder. Frame rates stay over 35 - 50 as long as combat is spread across different areas of the map and i can fight all 250 ai face to face and maintain about 15 fps. major increase just from allowing arma 2 to breath instead of being cramped on small hard rives loaded with junk. fell free to ask questions this experiment is not yet over.

[BasileyOne 10]

7200RPM[dunno about 10k/15k RPM] HDD's worth it. yep. switching to RAID 10/RAID 5 arrays could provide similar advantages.

8Mb hdd cache sucks. modern hdd's workload imply need for at least 512Mb RAM cache.

also you should stay from WD "products" - absence of support[or malformed one]of essential SATA features, could had dreadful impact not only on performance but reliability. for example, absence of NCQ support, no hot-plug support, bogus SMART "implementation" wasn't pleasing much[aside impotent IC/processor, despite cunning firmware, that both screwed under overwhelming real-world workload/dataflow, small cache and QA control issues on production].

generally 1Tb/disc-density hdd's - ROCKS !!

up to 190Mbps of SUSTAINED IO/bandwidth on tuned systems/setup !!

[i76 1]

also you should stay from WD "products" - absence of support[or malformed one]

Western Digital? their support is amazing... I've returned 2 HHD's on different occasions and had them replaced in 8 days from sending it... thats excellent support.

I love ASUS but had far more trouble with them and returns (RMA's) but I'd never tell anyone not to buy ASUS because they generally make the best MB.

[BasileyOne 10]

Western Digital? their support is amazing... I've returned 2 HHD's on different occasions and had them replaced in 8 days from sending it... thats excellent support.

I love ASUS but had far more trouble with them and returns (RMA's) but I'd never tell anyone not to buy ASUS because they generally make the best MB.

that actually good story. i head different ones about different vendors and different times and places. so it wouldn't be relevant nor proof anything

well, support could also help.

sometimes.

but sometimes they - can't. by-definition.

point is - much easier form of enjoying products benefits by means/way, excluding need to enjoy benefits from support existence/performance.

so, if product is GOOD, you never EVER know such word as "support", usually.

point is remain same: stay AWAY from WD hdd's: they SUCKS.

good news, however, recent HGST acquisition can contribute to some design flaws, partially with better HRM/designers resources, related IP/technology/experience.

bad news is, WD keep stuff stripped-down/thwarted even when they[along with Seagate]dominate market and price wars and damping was ended. thats classic example how greed, fueled by profitability can efficiently can kill advance of any kind of market[including formerly relying on advance ones].

ASUS ? mixed experience/feelings. not bad nor [exceptionally]good.

generally beast part of this company was...ship "Asrock"-branded motherboard :P

many from of their freaky monsters are just amazing :P both by ideas/implementation and by real-life performance :) [some decisions/solutions kinda remind me both former/notorious EpOX boards and ChainTech boards for some reasons :-) ]

and in most occasions, Gigabyte offer WAY better products than both, btw.

Edited September 19, 2012 by BasileyOne