My neighbor who is a graphic/video artist came to me yesterday asking about ways to speed up his machine in regards to video editing etc. He has a motherboard that supports 4 SATA drives ( has no hardware RAID ) and 2 are used by optical and the other 2 drives are 7200 RPM drives 1TB each. He is running a i7 processor and has 16GB Ram with Windows 7 64. He likes to multitask and so as he has a project crunching to encode videos etc, while he is working on other things. I checked his system resources out and the CPU and Ram aren't breaking a sweat. But Hard Drive activity is almost constant ( solid HD Activity ). He doesnt want to go with SSD's at this time as for its way too expensive for large capacity SSD's at this time.
One suggestion I had for him was to buy a SATA II controller for a PCI or PCIe slot and run RAID 0 with 2 drives, and use this drive pair for swap space as well as the location to crunch projects from. I was thinking that then his integrated SATA II controller would be used for a single HD for OS. This should keep the crunching on the RAID 0 to hammer out projects faster and keep his system responsive with the single OS / Application hard drive idle.
So questions are:
Is there a benefit to using a PCIe SATA II drive controller card vs PCI? ( Is there a bottleneck to be concerned about if he goes with a PCI vs PCIe card for SATA II communications? ) * His motherboard is pretty bare with no other PCI cards in the 2 slots. In addition to the 2 PCI slots he has a PCIe 1x slot and a PCIe 16x. The 16x slot has a good $200 video card in it.
He was also asking how much faster it would make crunching? I told him that it would be faster, but that I couldn't give him an exact figure. I have heard people state that RAID 0 makes data 2x faster, but I would think that it would be maybe 1.5x faster or maybe 1.9x faster at best. Also I would think that the SATA HD Controller chipset and RAID function performance might come into play as for a cheapie might be 1.5x performance and a higher end closer to the 1.9x.
Also he was talking about software RAID that he has used before back in the days of Windows 2000 Professional years ago vs adding a card to use Windows to make a RAID set. I told him that I'd go with a controller that is Hardware Based RAID, but he was asking for performance figures between Hardware and Software based RAID and I could only tell him that Hardware RAID was better.
I googled this and came up with lots of oppinions, but no facts. So I decided to post it here.
My suggestion to him would involve buying a SATA II controller that supports RAID 0 and another HD to be used for OS/Application install point as C: . Then take his two 1TB drives and use them as a matched pair for RAID 0 as say D: with optical drives as E: and F: ( Trying to convince him to use a small affordable SSD as the drive C: as for at $100 or less he can have like 90 to 120GB of space which is plenty for OS quick boot, application quick launch, keep swap space then on C: for the SSD speed advantage, and then use the two 1TB drive RAID 0 pair to chug out large projects that are too much for an affordable SSD solution at this time. )
