Mix of IDE and SATA disks? 2

[ImpetusEra]

I've got some new parts on order and wondering how to best make use of a pair of 200GB IDE drives from the old system. One thing I wanted with the new was mirroring so I ordered two 250GB sata drives for that purpose. Now performance wise would it make sense to split the sata mirror into two partitions, one for OS and the other for important data and then use the IDE drives for applications such as office suite and games? If Vista Ultimate offers striping/mirroring would it be a good or bad idea to implement that with the IDE drives? The motherboard has two IDE controllers and the only other device requiring IDE will be a dvd/cd-rom drive, the dvd burner is sata. Would there be a benefit to putting the hard drives on separate controllers with one sharing with the optical? Thanks.

 

[wahnula]

Wow...lots of questions, but here goes.

performance wise would it make sense to split the sata mirror into two partitions, one for OS and the other for important data and then use the IDE drives for applications

Yes, if you install the OS & apps to a smaller partition (this depends on how big your OS & application use is...look at your current WINDOWS & Program Files folder, double them, then add 10 gigs) the OS & apps stay to the outside of the platters and will load faster than if a drive head has to dance over 250 GB of data to find what it needs.

If Vista Ultimate offers striping/mirroring would it be a good or bad idea to implement that with the IDE drives?

Yes, it would be a bad idea. Since you are most likely using hardware RAID controllers on your mainboard (you should post the model# in your question) for the 250GB drives it is ALWAYS a bad idea to mix hardware & software RAID. Vista may have smoothed this out but I'm not willing to gamble on it, are you?

Would there be a benefit to putting the hard drives on separate controllers with one sharing with the optical?

Yes. Put drive #1 on IDE1 as master and drive #2 on IDE2 as master with the IDE optical as slave on the secondary.

My personal recommendation would be to create a RAID 1 array with the new 250GB drives, then partition the array into 50GB/200GB partitions. Now you have a redundant installation which will cover you if one of the new drives fail.

I would then partition one of the IDE drives into a 50/150 drive. Using NTBackup or Acronis, I would then set up a backup schedule for the data array to auto-backup to drive #1 (full 200GB), and the OS & Apps to the 50GB partition. This leaves another 200 GB for your "unimportant" files.

NOTE: If you are a performance-over-safety freak, you can instead build a RAID 0 array with the two 250GB drivs. partitioned into 100/400, and use the two 200GB drives for data-only backup.

As a rule, RAID arrays are constructed in the BIOS before loading Windows. For the sake of clarity I would install just the two SATA drives during Windows install, and connect the IDE drives later. In my case, Vista Ultimate saw my array without me adding drivers (the traditional F6 of XP) so that was all good.

Another reminder, avoid JBOD (or drive spanning) as this might place portions of files on both disks and if one disk goes so does the file. Best of luck.

Tony

"...an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind" - M.L. King

 

[ImpetusEra]

Thanks, lots of good points. I've always done my installations with a separate partition for important data. Just made it quicker to do a fresh OS install and not have to shuffle around pics, mp3s and documents.

Raid 1 has been my plan from the start for the sata drives as the board only offers raid on the sata controller (P5N-E SLI). 50/200 has been what I'm leaning towards. 50 will house nothing but the OS with the 200 holding pics/mp3s/documents, whatever would be a nuisance to recover in the event of a loss.

For the 200GB IDE drives I'm probably going to go with the primary IDE for game installations (they use so much space today) and the secondary shared with the optical for common desktop applications and such.

I also have a 250GB external usb drive so I'll probably just schedule nightly full/differential backup sets of the sata drives. Reinstalling applications/games won't be a big deal in the event of a loss.

Probably a 320GB+ sata would be a better solution for games/apps but I may as well make use of what I've already got for now.

You think there would be any benefit to moving the page file to one of the IDE drives? Thanks.

 

[wahnula]

You think there would be any benefit to moving the page file to one of the IDE drives?

I'm not a big fan of moving the page file(personal preference), but if you did place it on the IDE drive I doubt it would increase performance much if any. I say "I doubt" because I don't know.

It would be an interesting test to benchmark the system with the pagefile as-is and then relocated to the IDE drive. There are so many variables that the answer is not intuitive (to me, at least).

Tony

"...an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind" - M.L. King

 

[ImpetusEra]

It's easy enough to move between them. I may try it just to see if there's much difference.

 

[kmcferrin]

Moving the page file will make a difference if you find that you're using the pagefile a lot. If you're not, then you probably won't see a lot of difference.

I always recommend moving the pagefile on servers because they tend to have higher workloads, and therefore end up doing a lot of paging (needed data isn't always in memory). Having to interrupt your reads/writes from the system disk to do paging (or vice versa) does have a performance impact. You'll be reading from one section of the disk then have to skip out to another, then back and forth.

Moving it to a different partition has other benefits as well. A growing page file can't fill up your system partition if it's not on the system partition, etc.