Hard Drive Question

I'm planning to get a new disk drive. All other things being equal, would I get better performance from a) one 320 gig drive with 16 meg cache, or b) two 160 gig drives with 8 meg cache each, in a Raid 0 configuration? These will be on Windows XP, with a SATA 3.0 interface.

Thanks for any thoughts or comments!

The single drive - you really don't get much performance increase with the other. The larger cache will let the drive feed the data from the cache faster to SL.

I put a 32 meg one in my new system, and manage to get 30-40 FPS even on the extreme setting in clubs.

The RAID 0 configuration would offer better performance in theory if both setups were pushed to limits, but depending on the circumstance and operations at the time, whether you would actually notice it in a home environment on a day to day basis i would doubt. The other thing you need to think of is whether you need more space than the stripe setup is providing you. Running two drives striped of that size isnt going to take much to fill with the way applications are going these days.

So to answer straightly yes it would be quicker performance wise to run the striped setup, but i wouldnt go out of your way to do it in my opinion, the difference would not be hugely noticeable if at all.

You'll get better performance with the RAID 0 config, but you may not notice it. You'd probably be better off with a nice single drive.

Depends on what you want to do with the drive setup. Additional storage... add it to your existing setup and put your data, or programmes on it. Putting data is perhaps an easier way to keep track and for backups?
Putting programmes like SL on a seperate drive to the OS, may give you performance gains if you also transfer the SL cache as well.

This is all subjective if you have the discs on seperate controllers, as Master. Having them on the same controller (Master-Slave) will not gain you much at all.

I personally have a Raid setup for my SATA II, 5 HD's, which is used for data capture when I'm making movies. Using Hot Swapping, is useful for archiving, and cheaper than copying lots of data to DVD (even dual layer) in both costs and time. Perhaps overkill for the average user.

you could have a mfm drive in there and it wouldnt affect your framerate once everything got loaded

id do the single drive, easier to setup, and maintain the performance difference will not be something that your going to really notice unless you benchmark it

Thanks very much for your feedback and suggestions. I'll go with a larger single drive.
Pecos