TechLahore

Throw in an inexpensive 4-port SATA RAID controller to boost PC performance

If you want to give your PC a quick and inexpensive upgrade, you might consider doing what I just did: upgrade the storage subsystem. With 6.0Gbps SATA III cards now under $30, and RAID cards for SATA drives available on the cheap, there’s no reason to live in the old days and run your OS off a slow drive! Typically, a modern PC is most constrained in two departments; graphics performance, and disk I/O. If you can afford an upgrade of both, you’re sure to give your PC a nice life extension while giving yourself an enjoyable, smooth computing experience.

One of my secondary machines in my home office was starting to feel quite slow. I’m sure it was the usual Windows registry bloat coupled with the fact that it never had a blazing fast disk to begin with. A 5400RPM SATA drive was all. And that was hosting both the OS and some data. The processor on the machine is a dual core Pentium running at 3.0Ghz and the graphics card is an Nvidia 9400GT with 512MB RAM. Not otherworldly, but no slouches either. The poorest performer was certainly that old HDD.

I had recently purchased an el-cheapo $20 SIG 4-port SATA RAID Controller and happened to have some old 160GB Quantum 5400RPM hard drives lying around. Luckily I had 4, and they were the exact same size! You could probably pick drives like these up for $10-$15 bucks. I decided to do a fresh OS install so copying data and backing up apps etc. wasn’t really much of a concern. I moved my important data off to a USB drive and could now safely nuke the rest of the drive contents.

After completing the hardware install – which was a little bit tricky because I had to use one of the 3.5 inch floppy/card reader drive bays to install the 4th HDD, I was ready to create the RAID array. I was looking for performance, so striping was really going to be the ticket. I basically had two options a) Create a RAID 0 array with 640GB of capacity or b) a RAID 10 array with striping and mirroring, giving me 320GB. Did I really need the extra data security? Naaah, I thought. This was a secondary PC and I was going to store all my data to my Cisco home NAS anyway. So what if the OS tanks in case a drive croaks. I wouldn’t be losing much.

So, RAID 0 with 640GB it was.

The SIG RAID BIOS makes it particularly easy to create the array. It’s really just a couple of key presses and you’re done. Next, I booted using a Windows 7 (Original!) installation CD. I had to use the SIG RAID driver CD to initialize the RAID array and cause the Windows setup program to detect the drives… that went over quite well, even though the SIG driver disk had Windows 2003, XP and Vista drivers – nothing specific for Windows 7.

From there on, it was a piece of cake. I quickly wrapped up the Windows install and there I was. A Fresh PC which felt pretty snappy. I used the excellent Ninite installer to silently install my favourite apps – a good 15 or 20 of them – and I was in business.

Performance felt pretty good, but I wanted to measure it and see what the numbers said. I used the nifty little free tool, DiskBench to measure performance. Here’s what it said:

File Read/Write performance with the RAID card installed

If you find that hard to read, let me help. Read performance is 578.3MB/sec (that MegaBYTES!) or 4.6Gbps! And write performance was clocked at 131.15MB/sec or 1Gbps! That was good enough to get a 5.9 Windows Experience Index rating from the Windows Experience benchmarking tool.

So, for well under $100, I’ve given my system a pretty impressive boost in performance. If you’ve got a system with a free PCIe slot and you can find a cheap RAID card, give it a shot. You won’t regret it.

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