SATA

[Albereth]

Okay - one of the biggest factors influencing map load time is hard drive speed. My MoBo has onboard SATA controllers that are supposedly capable of 3Gb/s transfer rate I ran Everest and it says I am using the slow SATA. I read the manual and couldn't find any BIOS setting so I assume that there is an NForce driver that needs a slap or updating.

Any ideas? MoBo is an ASUS A8N-SLi Deluxe and Hard Drive is a Maxtor 10 300GB with 16MB buffer.

[sss]

well it could be a sata I drive!!!

and there is normally a jumper on the drive to set it to sata II or I for backwards compatibility if its a sata II drive!

[sss]

soo... is the drive SATA II?

[Ruslan74]

those transfer speeds are theoretical at best.

are your SATA drives plain SATA or SATA2 btw?

you can look up the latest Nvidia Nforce4 drivers on the www.nvidia.com website and see if they make a difference.

[doobiwan]

How much RAM do you have in the machine Alb? Does that board support RAID 0?

[Albereth]

Looks like it might be more related to the firmware of the HD. nVidia haven't have a nForce update in a while

[Albereth]

2GB RAM and MoBo supports all sorts of RAID. I only have the one drive though.

[doobiwan]

Hmm, well there goes any propellorhead idea's from me then ;) . ..

[Albereth]

Seems drive is limiting factor - oh well excuse to get that pair of Raptors

[Ruslan74]

eish... those raptors are fast... but are they worth for their cost? for the price of once 150GB raptor you can get a couple of 25GB SATA2 drives in RAID 0....

[Albereth]

But I couldn't have bragging rights and pull the hotties. But you're right. So at the expense of some really good looking children I'll think about your suggestion - and I am sure you meant 250GB.

[Ruslan74]

err.. yeah, 250GB... sorry for typo. :blush:

BF2's loading times will benefit from a raid setup and perhaps be faster than a single raptor.

[Bass]

Hmmm .. SSS did a good investigation into RAID just recently ... if I remember correctly his load times dropped by about 10-20 % .. ?

[Albereth]

@Bass - that's more or less what he said.

@Uselss - Dual Raptors in RAID 0

[sss]

My setup 2 x 320gb seagate 16mb sata2 = 117MB/s
Gigbabyte iRAM(4gigs) =132MB/s
SCSI 2 x 73GB 15krpm 8mb cache maxtor atlas IV=115MB/s
SATA 2 x 36GB 10krpm 8mb WD Raptor=95MB/s

ALL RAID 0

so maybe the raptors arent worth the bucks!

[sss]

it works quite well...my HDD flies... it never gets chunking on disk activity... i only every knows it actually using the disk by looking down and seeing the activity light!

[doobiwan]

How's the noise levels?

[sss]

well my pc fan makes so much noise.. u cant really hear anything else.... but i'll try check it out tonight!

[Ruslan74]

just watch out your ears dont get chopped by your fan hey... :p

[doobiwan]

My 5 year old Quantum Fireball 40Gb has always been noisy. It's so loud I can hear it from the other side of the house :o

But it's never given me a days trouble . .