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9880 buying dilema Raid or not to Raid & Battery

post #1 of 24
6/26/05 at 1:19pm
Thread Starter 
Hi Everyone,

After a couple years of living with my 5670 with the underpowered mobility 9000 video card and the choppy gameplay at low settings, I'm thinking about upgrading to a 9880. I love my sager and have total faith in the products after 2 years of abusing this one and having it come back for more (I once spilled an entire glass of wine over the keyboard and it crashed only to come back completely fine after a drying a cleaning period-they are well built and work great..I even dropped it a couple times.. and the pctorque service and forums have been outstanding).

My dilema has two points. Am I reading this correctly? The 9880 has a battery that does not come out without unscrewing 3 screws? I know the laptop is a power hog but I can't just keep a extra battery or two with me on a long plane trip to load up when one dies? they dont just pop out easy? I did read that airline power plugs aren't powerful enough for the 9880...

My second dilema and more important is the question of Raid 0. I'm a gamer and I like everything to work as smooth and fast as possible. I noticed on my desktop that when I added a second 10K rpm drive and ran my games off that, I had a performance increase. I believe having the game run on a separate drive from the windows drive I get better performance... am I delusional? Anyways... I would like to try Raid 0 and read here that two 5400 rpm SATA drives are actually faster then two 7200rpm ata drives?? has this been others experience too? Should I go with two 5400 SATAs?? I'm kind of scared of 5400 drives after replacing the 5400 in my 5670 with a hitachi 7200 and having immediate performance boost in gaming.. I couldnt play americas army without choppiness with the 5400... the game even ran better on an external usb drive then it did on the 5400 that came with my 5670....

No matter what I do, I'm looking forward to dumping the mobility ati 9000 and getting the ultra...

Thanks for reading my desperate buyers ramblings... any opinions would be appreciated...

Mike Kelly, Oak Park, IL
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post #2 of 24
6/26/05 at 2:15pm
From everything I have read, 2 5400 RPM SATA drives in a RAID 0 will equal the performance of 1 7200 RPM PATA drive. And you can carry extra batteries, but you do have to unscrew the battery to replace it.
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post #3 of 24
6/26/05 at 2:19pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rotorhead
From everything I have read, 2 5400 RPM SATA drives in a RAID 0 will equal the performance of 1 7200 RPM PATA drive. And you can carry extra batteries, but you do have to unscrew the battery to replace it.
Thanks for the reply....BUT will the 2 5400s in raid 0 outperform 2 7200s in raid 0 is the question...

mike
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post #4 of 24
6/26/05 at 2:28pm
No they won't
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post #5 of 24
6/26/05 at 2:34pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rotorhead
No they won't
Thanks rotohead but waht about the pctorque review...

http://www.notebookforums.com/showthread.php?t=84906

look in the hard drives section... it says..

>>>We tested with both 80GB 5400rpm SATA drives in raid 0 vs 60GB 7200rpm PATA drives in raid 0. The SATA drives barely won in PCmark04 testing, but only in the raid 0 configuration. This is due to the throughput of the SATA technology, when combined with the raid configuration. You can see the benchmark results below in the benchmark section.<<<
I'm wondering if people have actually noticed this in real life use...

Mike
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post #6 of 24
6/26/05 at 3:09pm
As it also says, they took the very top section of the graph and it was negligable. There is another review in Tomshardware and Maximumpc that are similar in results, all state the difference is not noticable. Interesting thing in a maximum pc mag showed that in gaming RAID 0 was slower to load than just a single 7200 drive (unless it was a 10K drive). Of course this is all things I have read, I had a RAID 0 array in my desktop at home and was not really impressed with it so I changed it back to just 2 drives. My recent 9880 order included 2-80 SATA 5400 Raid 0 drives only because it was cheaper than the 60G 7200 and 100G 5400 that I was originally going to get, with the same performance as the 60G drive alone. Although I am now waiting and will probably get the 100G 7200 when they are available, and not RAID them.
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post #7 of 24
6/26/05 at 3:28pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Rotorhead
As it also says, they took the very top section of the graph and it was negligable. There is another review in Tomshardware and Maximumpc that are similar in results, all state the difference is not noticable. Interesting thing in a maximum pc mag showed that in gaming RAID 0 was slower to load than just a single 7200 drive (unless it was a 10K drive). Of course this is all things I have read, I had a RAID 0 array in my desktop at home and was not really impressed with it so I changed it back to just 2 drives. My recent 9880 order included 2-80 SATA 5400 Raid 0 drives only because it was cheaper than the 60G 7200 and 100G 5400 that I was originally going to get, with the same performance as the 60G drive alone. Although I am now waiting and will probably get the 100G 7200 when they are available, and not RAID them.
Thanks again rotorhead... Ill check out those articles and maybe do what you did then...or perhaps just get two 7200rpm drives with no raid... raid seems to me now not to be worth the trouble and a pain if I ever want to reload windows... two drives, with or without raid would kill the battery faster too...

mike
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post #8 of 24
6/26/05 at 4:12pm
You can always move to RAID if you don't like the single drive performance.
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post #9 of 24
6/27/05 at 3:02am
Warning : you have just one channel in the 9880. You will have not all of gain of the RAID 0 configuration. With 2 channels, you can write and read at the same time, but not with one channel
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post #10 of 24
6/27/05 at 3:09am
Quote:
Originally Posted by deuch
Warning : you have just one channel in the 9880. You will have not all of gain of the RAID 0 configuration. With 2 channels, you can write and read at the same time, but not with one channel
Geeeze,

Can you point to anywhere that proves this statement for SATA drives? I, for one, would really like to know. I will agree that this is the case for the P-ATA configurations; hoswever, with SATA? Just not sure that the statemetn is accurate. Please clarify your source.
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post #11 of 24
6/27/05 at 9:22am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by G-Omaha
Geeeze,

Can you point to anywhere that proves this statement for SATA drives? I, for one, would really like to know. I will agree that this is the case for the P-ATA configurations; hoswever, with SATA? Just not sure that the statemetn is accurate. Please clarify your source.
Yes Please do... I have never read anything about "Channels" and the 9880... Now I'm really confused.. is raid totally pointless? or are you referring to the larger data transfer with SATA over P-ATA? I dont think so since you refer to the 9880 directly... need more info here please... also do any of you have an opinion on having two drives, non raid and running my games off the second one? do you get any performance boost by keeping games off the hard drive that is running the OS??

Mike
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post #12 of 24
6/27/05 at 2:06pm
Might look at this from days gone by. It cites the source, etc...

http://www.notebookforums.com/showth...ave#post521317
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post #13 of 24
6/27/05 at 2:27pm
Well that was an interesting read, changes my ideas on things quite a bit. I did not realize the configuration was that much different from a desktop system on the HDD controllers . . . So if I read all that correctly than 2 PATA drives will be working off 1 PATA channel that can not access both drives simultaneously (whether they are in RAID or not) so if you have a PATA setup in a RAID, you really can not get any benefit from the RAID with the PATA drives. And if you want to use 2 seperate PATA drives it will be fine as long as you are not trying to access the drives at the same time. This is not the case with SATA as that connection can read/write simultaneously on both connections . . . Does that sound about correct?

:edit: wow I have been up too long with too little sleep
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post #14 of 24
6/27/05 at 4:56pm
You will still realize a speed up even with the shared PATA channel - just not as great as if you had two individual channels (System does not have to wait for the drive as much with the RAID-0 setup than it would with a non-raid implementation). I think you got the main gist of the topic.
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post #15 of 24
6/27/05 at 9:15pm
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by G-Omaha
You will still realize a speed up even with the shared PATA channel - just not as great as if you had two individual channels (System does not have to wait for the drive as much with the RAID-0 setup than it would with a non-raid implementation). I think you got the main gist of the topic.

Ok...I'll still have read the article.. I'm going to do two hard drvies either way... you're saying I'll get better performance with Raid 0 but not what I should be getting speed wise.... If I got Raid 0 with two SATA drives would there be any channel inhibiting effects?

Mike
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post #16 of 24
6/27/05 at 11:08pm
Mike,

No, but get at least 5,400 for spindle speeds. If you are going to go the Raid-0 route, I would get the SATA drives. If not then, I'd go with the 7,200 PATA drives.
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post #17 of 24
6/27/05 at 11:35pm
They also did the comparo between 60gb and 80gb drives. There's a difference as the 80gb drive features a more dense platter making it inherently faster than an equally spec'd 60gb drive.
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post #18 of 24
6/27/05 at 11:36pm
Oh and if it were me i'd put the page file/os on one drive and programs/games on another. then i'd have a usb 2.5 inch drive for music and movies and the such. but this is just me.
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post #19 of 24
6/28/05 at 2:40am
Thread Starter 
Quote:
Originally Posted by digitalpunk
Oh and if it were me i'd put the page file/os on one drive and programs/games on another. then i'd have a usb 2.5 inch drive for music and movies and the such. but this is just me.
\\\

I actually did the pagefile/games thing with my desktop..

G-Omaha....Thanks for all the info!! And Rotorhead thank you too! I read up and decided to order the 9880 with two 80gb 5400 SATA drives in Raid 0 I have to try raid just for the hell of it... I'm now wondering if I could press my luck and get an opinion on the processor... I like th 1 mb cache but the 64bit chips with the 2mb cache and upgrade ability seem to be interesting.. do you think its worth it or I won't see any performance improvement until the newer versions of windows...?

Mike

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post #20 of 24
6/28/05 at 2:45am
Ok for S-ATA disks. But the problem still with P-ATA
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