laptop raid

[songokussm]

I have dell's i9300 and an xps 2. both have horrible hd performance. in my opinion.

Both have Hitachi's 60gb 7200rpm 8mb cache, fasted laptop drives i could find . other wise known as "HTS726060m9at00"

examples are,
I load photoshop, my whole system practically locks up, during the loading period.

Secondly which is even more annoying. At work we use the popular bittorrent distribution method. I use the azures client. During transferring data my system crawls. as in unusable. i usually set one of my laptops to xfer the data and while i use the other one to continue work. i have the client setup to only work on 10 files at a time, and its write sequence is at 10 as well.

The reason for the laptops is my working station is small and i only use it for 8ish hours a word day. And then someone else brings their own stuff in. security is a huge priority where i work. so everyone uses and brings their own hardware, so laptops and sff are the only solution. I currently have 2 sff that do my heavy work, but i still prefer to use my laptops.

any suggestion on laptops that support raid with benchmarks. or any other ideas?

thanks.

 

[Cook1]

What's your other specs with these laptops? Mainly CPU and RAM.

 

[mparr1708]

Originally posted by: Cook1
What's your other specs with these laptops? Mainly CPU and RAM.

In addition to Cook1's question about the rest of your hardware I would like to know if you are still using the Dell default load of the OS or if you have reloaded the machine. If you are still using the default dell load of the OS I would suggest scratching the drive and reloading the box with a clean copy of the OS with no dell bloatware. Install your programs and see what type of performance you get then. Either of those laptops should be able to run those programs fine as long as they have decent specs. You should have at least 1gb of ram for photoshop IMHO.

EDIT:

Also raid would improve performance but in a notebook you are probably going to be limited to 2 drives which severly limits your ability to build a fast raid setup. Really your only option for performance increase would be to stripe the disk. With two notebook ata disks in a stripe the performance would increase but not enough to justify the cost IMHO. Price to performance ratio of that kind of setup has to be horrible.

 

[ShellGuy]

My first question is have you used a lappy for this work before? Second is if yes then what was it. There are only a few lappys out that rival the XPS2 in specs for dollar. If you have the cash to drop max out ram and cpu and you should be fine.



Will G.

 

[corkyg]

A striped RAID 0 array in a laptop makes little sense. If either drive failes you lose everything. I have had a laptop with two hard drives - one a removable module replacing another device. That is great for cloning and having a ready-to-go 100% drive replacement.

If you have a laptop with two HDDs, then a RAID 1 (mirroring) would make sense. That provides a constant 100% redundancy in case of a drive failure.

Not many lappies will take two HDDs internally.

 

[songokussm]

@cook1
for the i9300 i got 1.6 cpu, 512x2 ddr2 533, geforce 6800.
for xps2 i got 2g cpu, 512x2 ddr 533, geforce 6800 ultra.

I went with "low end" cpus because cpu "hourse" power does not effect usage. I have tested both machines in underclocked and overclocked modes. Underclocked at about 800mhz and at default and i see very little or no difference. in most cases. (wow excluded).

@mparr1708
machine was redone. Formated right after delivery. who needs all that dell crap. infact the only dell item i have installed is quickset for my volume buttons. all update bios, drivers.

@everyone else
I would use a raid 0, all of my data is backed up on to an external drive. Also something to notice is, i get better speeds on my laptops when i have my external drive doing all the work.

I have never used laptops in this situation before. it was an option at my work. they would pay for the laptop (to a point) and so of course i went with it. Those who didnt, will be using the same hardware for the next 2 years. I personally own these so i can upgrade or whatever any time i want to. (yes that means you my lovly 7800... just wait a little longer)...

sry about the spell and any other issues. i just worked a 16 hour day.

nighters

 

[ShellGuy]

did you think of upgrading the xps2 to 2gb ram?


Will G>

 

[songokussm]

in the past, just through experience. I have not noticed any performance increase with 2gb of ram vs 1gb of ram.

 

[TechJunky]

Just a quick question: with your high volume of file movin' have you checked to make sure your HD isn't fragged to hell? Used to defrag my hard drive every week or so... it can make a world of difference!

 

[songokussm]

i use o&o degrag, usually 2ish times a week. The mthiod is compele by name. a wonderful program.