Cheap way to improve I/O

Question

I see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96dWOEa4Djs from http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2009/03/27.html and get amazed of the improvenment.

I have a good workstation (Sun Ultra M4, 2 AMD Opteron, 8GB RAM, NVidia FX 1500) and feel as fast as... any other computer in the city (except when rendering).

I blame windows for it (I can't use linux because run 3d max) but now I wonder if is possible improve the I/O.

I run VM (1-3 per time), 3D Max, Photoshp, Python... plus some vide encoding and stuff like that.

I have not enough money to buy a SSD and have 2 SATA drivers. What I can do? Is possible mount on windows a RAM drive? how use it?

Answer 1

Have you thought about using a RAID array? You can get some decent I/O improvements from a RAID-0 configuration..

although I must ask - are you sure your bottleneck is disk I/O and not memory or CPU? In my experience disk I/O has traditionally been the last bottleneck on a machine (especially in large scale machines) and more often than not memory, poor use of pagefiles and CPU throughput have been the tension points.

Answer 2

Go for UltraSCSI if you want more disk I/O bandwidth. But do not meter your disk speed looking at how fast programs are loading. Better disk subsystems and /or configurations (such as RAID) are only useful at transferring large data blocks, e.g video/audio editing ,not loading operating system files or application executables.

Did you scanned your computer for spyware? ;)

Answer 3

Sounds like you're probably CPU bound. All the programs you listed depend highly on memory and CPU rather than disk speed. Since it looks like you have plenty of memory I'm guessing it's mostly CPU slowing you down.

If you really do wish to improve your disk performance without spending much money you can try putting your disks on a Raid 0 setup. This will make your computer treat them like one large data storage volume and speed things up by reading from both disks simultaneously. Keep in mind that this also increases the likelihood that you will lose data since the rail volume could become corrupt or one of the disks could fail (causing data on both disks to be lost).

Alternately, you can try buying a faster disk drive. Newegg sells Western Digital Raptor drives (Currently the fastest SATA non-SSD disks available) from between $100-$150 (after rebate) http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&N=40000014&Description=raptor&name=Internal%20Hard%20Drives. These could give you a 20-30%+ boost in disk IO depending on how good your current drives are.