Well, you mention the magic Photoshop, a program which eats memory for lunch and demands more.
As for RAID 0, avoid this like the plague.
avoid raid 0? why would you suggest this? yes its overkill for most home users, but there isn’t anything wrong with it.
Disk access is faster in a RAID 0 configuration than the indivual drives themselves.
With games taking gigs of hard drive space these days, I can see why some home users might want that.
Adding more RAM will also improve disk access, because the memory that isn’t taken up by programs can be used for caching.
Even if you aren’t running Photoshop, the operating system can probably come up with some way to use whatever RAM you give it. IMO, any new PC you buy should have at least 1 GB if you’re looking for performance.
It’s downright dangerous. You lose your data if any one of the disks fails. If you want faster loading times, try RAID 1 - mirroring.
I goofed. I ment RAID 1. Home users usually don’t have backups, so having hard drive redundancy is a good thing.
:rolleyes: Can you show me in the thread where you asked what his requirements are? Can most home users even articulate what “requirements” are? “I run the Internet!”
Well, to defuse the “what my requirements are” snit, I do do some gaming and lots of multitasking, so plenty of memory is essential. First, the old thread from the last time I brought this up is here. I don’t often run FPSes, which is one of the standard benchmarks, but I do run some things that are pretty heavy on everything–Neverwinter Nights, for example. My computer is starting to show its age and drag, especially on boot. The 1.3 GHz P4 is still enough for most things, but the 256 MB of RAM is starting to show its limitations, especially since I’ve had to escalate what I run in residency to keep my computer clean on a school network. The reason I haven’t upgraded the RAM is because I got tricked into buying RAMBUS (this was back in 2000) and we all know what happened to that. At this point, I’d rather just upgrade everything. My computer case is so old it doesn’t have any keychain USB capabilites and doesn’t have enough space for other things. The motherboard has two USB1 ports and that’s it (I had to buy a FireWire card for my iPod.) I never want to deal with Dell again, especially when it comes to power supplies. The computer is heavy, it’s loud, and I am going to be stripping (for now) my sound card and speakers, my video card (I could use a new one of those as well) and monitor, the ethernet card, the DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives (replacements I bought), the Zip drive (which I haven’t used in years because I never got a PCI adapter card to add IDEE capability), the TV card, the FireWire card, both hard drives (40 and 120 gigs), and I think that’s it. I might get rid of the ethernet card because they come onboard these days, and I’m going to ditch the modem because it never worked right and I’d want to buy a new one anyway. Also, I need to buy a new copy of Microsoft Office, as my copy is getting pretty dang long in the tooth and isn’t really compatible with anything anymore (although I still think Word, at least, peaked with Word 95 and has been on a long bloating downhill since.)
Not really. The most common problems of the home user - accidental data deletion and power surges - are not in any way solved by RAID 1. RAID 1 guards only against physical failure of a single disk in the set. If you use it as a backup alternative, you’re lulling yourself into a false sense of security. And on top of that, disk write performance is decreased by RAID 1.
Better to have a daily scheduled disk-to-disk copy, or better yet, an authentic backup strategy using an external device or network service. Both of these things are getting cheaper, easier to use, and more widely available every day.
It was an implied question, and as you can see, the OP caught it and responded quite coherently.
Per the user’s requirements, I think his priority needs to be on maximizing RAM (1024MB would be a safe number, leaving room to grow without overdoing it) and getting the best video card he can afford. He needn’t concern himself with getting 64-bit CPU unless he intends to use this as his primary machine for more than 3 years, and 3 years is conservative at that.
In fact - not to make any bets, you understand - It wouldn’t surprise me too much if we were still having this same discussion 3 years from now. It’s a shame the web wasn’t as widespread when Intel chips went from 16-bit to 32-bit… it might be instructive to go back to discussions about that transition. I don’t think the urgency is the same this time around. Of course that will not dissuade me from getting a 64-bit CPU in my next machine, just because I can. 
Thing is, I don’t see a reason not to get a 64-bit computer. I can easily use this computer for quite a few more years–the one I have now, aside from some drive upgrades, and a different OS–is essentially the same as the one I bought four years ago. The price difference between an AMD Athlon XP (which is what I was originally looking at) and a Athlon 64 is trivial, as is the price difference in motherboards, since I do plan to hang onto this one for a while. The Antec Sonata case I want has plenty of room for PCI cards and drives–I could get myself one of those 8-in-1 media reader cards to replace my floppy, pull the adapter to get the Zip disc back to the 3.5" size, put both the DVD and CD-RW drives back in, and both HDD and still have room to add two HDDs and another 5.25" drive. Basically, I’m partially designing around a case, where the main on-board stuff I’m looking for for the motherboard is two front USB2 ports and 6 PCI slots. AMD is because I’m cheap, and I know the basics, but I don’t know all the technical nitty-gritty on choices of chipsets, sockets, and the like. Quite frankly, as I said in the linked thread, I hate onboard stuff.
I, like my father for the longest time for the family computer, am an upgrader. When I decide I really need to upgrade, I pull the old stuff that will still work, maybe buy a new case, buy the new stuff I need, and put the old stuff in a box (or try to sell it on eBay.)
If the economics work out for you, and you do plan to wring every drop of life out of it, godspeed to you and your 64-bit CPU. I myself plan to get one as well, although I can’t say for sure when 64-bit computing will change the home computing experience one way or the other. At this point it seems largely moot with a possible bias toward backward compatibility of future software.
Well, there really isn’t much of a price difference between a low end Athlon 64, and a high end Athlon XP. And the Athlon 64 processors really shine when it comes to gaming performance; the Athlon 64 2800+ (which cost $120) will have much better game performance than $100 Athlon XP 2800+ or even the $130 Athlon XP 3000+.
I you are on a strict budget, you can pick up an Athlon 64 2800+, 1 GB Corsair Value Select RAM, and an Asus K8N Motherboard with Nforce 3 250GB chipset, for less than $300. I have that same exact configuration of parts in my machine (combined with a Geforce FX 5900) and it works perfectly, and Neverwinter Nights runs quite smoothly.
Just curious, what video card do you have now? If you want to upgrade that too, the Geforce 6600 GTs are the best bang for the buck performance right now, and usually cost $190-$200 for the AGP version.
I have an old Nvidia Geforce2 GTS 32 MB card. Trust me, that will need replacing as well. I mentioned Neverwinter Nights because I’m more likely to buy Neverwinter Nights 2 than I am Doom 3 or the like, so while I need upgraded hardware, it doesn’t have to be that hot. In any case, the video card is on the bottom of the list. I figure a motherboard, CPU, RAM, and the new case will be about $400. Add on another $100 for the copy of Office I need, plus other little things like the PCI adapter card to add IDEE capability, and the video card goes way down.
RAID 1 has absolutely no effect on load times – it simply keeps an exact copy of one hard drive on another, in case of a physical failure, the system can simply change to the other drive and tell you to replace the first. If you want quicker load times (which recent testing has shown may be questionable) you use RAID 0 to stripe across two different hard drives.
But you can’t exceed 4 gigs of RAM if you don’t go with the 64-bit architecture, so that won’t work.
(Unless you were considering assembling a 64-bit machine with less than 4 gigs of RAM?)
Not true… all things being equal, RAID 1 results in faster reads but slower writes. Of course a lot of this depends on the controller, caching, and configuration.
But your point stands… I see no reason for home users to bother with RAID unless they just like tinkering. Better to put the money into a backup strategy.
I stand by my statement, RAID 0 is fater than RAID 1
RAID 0:
“I/O performance is greatly improved by spreading the I/O load across many channels and drives”
RAID 1:
“Twice the Read transaction rate of single disks, same Write transaction rate as single disks”
“Transfer rate per block is equal to that of a single disk”
I stand by my statement, RAID 0 is faster than RAID 1
I can type, really…
You can stand by that statement because it’s true, but don’t pretend as if it was your original statement. RAID 1 is still faster than no RAID at all. And do you still think RAID 0 is of “questionable” benefit, or not? 
Per the second statement in my pervious post, RAID 1 is no faster than no RAID at all.
“Transfer rate per block is equal to that of a single disk”
The system has to write to two drives at the same time, and it only reads from the primary drive. The load times are no faster at all.
Yes, but didn’t you also say…
What happened to that part?
It is false to say that it only reads from the primary disk. In RAID 1, generaly both disks are used for seeks. Although the found block is only transferred from one disk, the average seek time is cut in half. Since any given file consists of thousands or millions of blocks, that adds up to thousands or millions of seeks. Result: shorter load times.
Also, if you use a RAID-enabled disk controller, you can duplex the reads and get reads that are N times as fast, where N is the number of disks in your mirror.
Here’s a few more web sites stating that RAID 1 results in faster reads… plenty of them out there.
http://www.d-silence.com/feature.php?id=209&pn=1
http://docs.hp.com/en/J6369-90011/ch01s03.html
http://www.rad-direct.com/Product-RAID-Levels.htm