Hard drive performance questions

[nth1739 0]

I am on a quest to make Arma as playable as possible as I am sure 50% of you out there are too

Since purchasing ArmA I have upgraded to SLI 7950GT which helped to increase my max FPS quite a bit, but I still get the intermittent stuttering where FPS drops to 15-20 while objects/textures load in the cache (especially in towns). The frame rate goes back up after objects load but I really want to reduce that "load time" as much as possible.

My hard drive is a few years old so I was wondering if anyone can give me positive feedback about upgrading. Currently I have a single ATA-133 hard drive. Would upgrading to a new SATA-300 help increase in game performance much? What about RAID 1 configs, how much of a boost would that bring? Thanks

[Vassago 0]

Raid 1 would do nothing for performance. That's strictly for security. It strips information from 1 hard drive to another, as a backup.

Raid 0 is what increases performance. Multiple hard drives act together as 1. Down side is, if 1 drive in the array fails, you lose everything. I'm running a Raid 0 array with 2 250GB hard drives right now. Runs smooth

[Mr_Tea 0]

Even without an RAID setup, SATA is faster than the IDE drives.

[nth1739 0]

@Vassago, Yes you are correct, I had the RAID 1 confused with 0.

@Mr_Tea, thank you for stating the obvious, but I am looking for a little more technical feedback... thanks for playing though

[victor26 0]

I had a SATA300 7400 rpm drive in my computer and had zero hard drive lag. The drive went out (was dropped by the Fed Ex or UPS or whatever delivery service it came from. Passed a drive test but must still have had damage but that's another story). I replaced it with two SATA150 10,000 rpm Raptor drives in a Raid 0. Same computer, same drivers, same OS same everything. On paper this should have been faster than the Sata300 drive (Sata300-3 GB/s w/ 1 data line 7400 rpm. Sata150-1.5 GB/s w/ 2 data lines at 10,000 RPM). I now have hard drive lag. Not as much as my friend who has nearly the same computer as I do, but only 1 SATA150 drive, but it's there and it annoys me after having that Sata300 drive.

If you don't have at least 1GB of the highest speed RAM your motherboard can take, though, I would start there. You wouldn't believe the difference between a system with 512MB and one with 1GB of RAM. 1.5-2GB is even better, but the performance boost starts to drop off after 1.5GB in my experience.

[nth1739 0]

I had a SATA300 7400 rpm drive in my computer and had zero hard drive lag. The drive went out (was dropped by the Fed Ex or UPS or whatever delivery service it came from. Passed a drive test but must still have had damage but that's another story). I replaced it with two SATA150 10,000 rpm Raptor drives in a Raid 0. Same computer, same drivers, same OS same everything. On paper this should have been faster than the Sata300 drive (Sata300-3 GB/s w/ 1 data line 7400 rpm. Sata150-1.5 GB/s w/ 2 data lines at 10,000 RPM). I now have hard drive lag. Not as much as my friend who has nearly the same computer as I do, but only 1 SATA150 drive, but it's there and it annoys me after having that Sata300 drive.

If you don't have at least 1GB of the highest speed RAM your motherboard can take, though, I would start there. You wouldn't believe the difference between a system with 512MB and one with 1GB of RAM. 1.5-2GB is even better, but the performance boost starts to drop off after 1.5GB in my experience.

@ Victor : Thanks man, this is exactly the info I was looking for. I have 2GB of decent ram (not really performance/OC RAM) so I think I will start with just a single SATA/300 drive and see how that works. I can always purchase another one later if I want, but based on what Victor said I think a single will do just fine. Thanks for all the feedback guys, now I have to start saving my dollars

[Kode 0]

@Vassange: First off RAID 1 does improve performance, same as with RAID 0.

The writing in RAID 1 is slower then the RAID 0 because he needs to write the same data on both disks, on the RAID 0 it is split in half.

But the read speed is the same, as he uses the 2 drives to read data.(so he can split the reading over the 2 drives) This is the same for raid0. As the game does only needs to read, there isn't any performance difference.

@Victor76 you are completely wrong.

There is no performance gain between SATA 150 and 300 hard drives. This simply because a hard disk cannot read at such speeds yet. The 150/300 is for the maximal speed that could go through a sata cable. A standard 7200rpm hard disk reads at a speed of around 60Mb/s, which is quite far from the 1.5Gb/s a 150 SATA cable can handle. They made the cable that fast so that it doesn't need replacement in the next years.

[OFPDude 0]

stick with your ATA133, you won't see much if any performance difference in drive speeds. SATA 1 and 2 speeds are only really effective for RAID and only then when using two drives.

there are no hard drives in existance that would increase the performance of a video game.....spend your money on a memory upgrade instead

[victor26 0]

Well like I said, all I can tell you is my experience with it. I don't claim to be a raid or SATA expert. Even if what you say is true, that they don't use the full potential of the cable, the rest of the equation would still make you think the raid would be faster.

2 drives at 10,000 rpm splitting the reading and writing versus 1 drive at 7,400 rpm doing 100% of the work. On paper the raid should be faster with or without the full potential of the cables.

All I can say is that in my machine with nothing changed but the hard drives, the SATA150 raid is slower than the SATA300 single was. I don't know why, maybe the SATA300 is more efficient at moving the data on the drive or something. I just know it was faster. Load times were faster and hard drive lag durring games was non existant.

[OFPDude 0]

sure the 2 10,000 rpm drives running as RAID-0 should in theory be much faster than a single SATA2 drive. But performance is highly dependent on the type/size of files be accessed

that said....as for game performance....IMO any game that struggles to keep up with a harddisk is poorly developed. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not pointing my finger at ArmA...the developers have made quite an amazing game, hiccups here and there are not too surprising to me.

If you visit the FSX forums you will find many posts about poor performance in flight simulator X and scenery loading causing issues. After the SP1 release a few days ago, many people are now seeing upto 50% performance increases with much higher graphical settings.

just goes to show that lazy unoptimized code can leave many people thinking thay have a slow system which needs upgrading.

how many games are being sold with requirements for a SATA2 drive

[fubarno1 0]

you could always go for the hyperdrive a little faster than a raptor