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#1
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More HD or more processor
Hi,
I am assembling a new PC and have a quick question... Should I put more money buying a quad core processor and 1 HD 500GB or a dual core processor and 2 HD 250GB in raid? I was thinking in the first option, but a friend told me 2 HD working itogether will make the pc faster. I use relatively heavy databases and intensive statistical programming. Thanks in advance. PA |
#2
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More HD or more processor
"PA" wrote...
I am assembling a new PC and have a quick question... Should I put more money buying a quad core processor and 1 HD 500GB or a dual core processor and 2 HD 250GB in raid? I was thinking in the first option, but a friend told me 2 HD working itogether will make the pc faster. I use relatively heavy databases and intensive statistical programming. RAID 1 (mirror) will not measurably improve performance. RAID 0 (stripe) will improve performance, but with a higher risk of data loss from a single HD failure. For your database work, you should go to RAID 10 (stripe + mirror) for performance + data safety, which will require a minimum of 4 HDs. If you REALLY need the performance, I'd go with 6 x WD Raptor 150s in RAID 10. Unless your database or statistics program can use 4 cores, or you run both at the same time, you'll likely be better off with a dual-core CPU at a higher clock speed. |
#3
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More HD or more processor
"PA" wrote in message ... Hi, I am assembling a new PC and have a quick question... Should I put more money buying a quad core processor and 1 HD 500GB or a dual core processor and 2 HD 250GB in raid? I was thinking in the first option, but a friend told me 2 HD working itogether will make the pc faster. I use relatively heavy databases and intensive statistical programming. Thanks in advance. PA Your friend is right, but I'd suggest a third option. Go with a cheap 500GB hard drive, plus two cheap 250GB hard drives in RAID. The 500GB drive is for backups. I'd suggest Acronis True Image for automatic scheduled backups of the entire RAID array. -Dave |
#4
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More HD or more processor
PA wrote:
Hi, I am assembling a new PC and have a quick question... Should I put more money buying a quad core processor and 1 HD 500GB or a dual core processor and 2 HD 250GB in raid? I was thinking in the first option, but a friend told me 2 HD working itogether will make the pc faster. I use relatively heavy databases and intensive statistical programming. Thanks in advance. PA Multiple core processors help, if there is thread-level parallelism or program level parallelism. A quad core would help, as long as the cores can be loaded well by the programs being used. As an example, on some games, the loading pattern on quad cores (and this is with thread-level parallelism), ends up at 100%-30%-30%-30%. Which means one core tends to be loaded more heavily than the others. There aren't really many situations where there is "perfect scaling" with the number of cores added. Understanding how your applications are designed, and whether they use multiple cores, is how you make the decision to go with more cores or not. I presume a database benefits from quick access time, and not raw megabytes per second. Access time is dominated by seek time on the hard drive controller. A number of drives have been benchmarked here. http://www.storagereview.com/Testbed4Compare.sr A 15,000 RPM disk has lower seek time than a 10,000 RPM disk. And SSD (solid state drives, either RAM based or flash memory based) are faster and more expensive, than regular hard drives. Being able to accept a smaller capacity storage device, would make possible the usage of faster solutions. (A single good 64GB SSD flash drive costs $2000. Good ones have wear leveling, to prevent wearout of the flash chips due to limited write life. Some of the tables here, show it is possible to get 10000 IOPS from one of these drives. This company makes a driver that is supposed to supplement the poor write performance of SSDs.) http://mtron.easyco.com/news/papers/...benchmarks.pdf RAM memory is about $25 per gigabyte now, so to build a storage device based on RAM, would cost about 64*25 = $1600 for 64GB of memory parts, without considering the additional infrastructure needed to make it work. The actual price charged by the companies making them, is astronomical. If portions of the database are frequently accessed, then caching structures can help with that. If the database software has the ability to cache frequently accessed info in system memory, then the database performance may improve with time. It is possible that adding additional memory to the computer, would aid in the construction of a software based cache. It is better for the database software to arrange such caching, as it understands the structures better than any "dumb" RAID card you might add to the computer. Paul |
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