Liam McLennan

February 2009 Entries

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Moving On

Thanks for having me Geeks With Blogs, but I am moving my blog on to the grey havens of the interweb.

If anyone cares, all new materials will be posted to http://hackingon.net
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RAID and You

We have known for sometime that hard drive speed is the most common performance bottleneck for .NET developers working in visual studio. As Scott Guthrie put it:

"If you have a slow hard-drive, Visual Studio will end up being blocked as it waits for it to complete these read/write operations - which can really slow down your overall development experience. "

and:

"
Consider getting a 10,000rpm hard drive.  These are lightening fast and can make a big difference over the default 7,200rpm drives that typically come with desktops"

Western Digital VelociraptorSo when researching my most recent development machine upgrade I gave serious consideration to a couple of Western Digital Velociraptors. By all reports these things leave convential drives chocking in a cloud of I/O burned rubber. But alas, the price! Expect to pay approximately 400% of the price of a conventional 7,200rpm drive.

Now that is a bit out of my price range (thanks global economic crisis) but what I did have lying around was three regular 250Gb SATA drives.

The machine in question has an Asus P5E motherboard, which includes the outstanding Intel ICH9R raid controller. In five minutes I was up and running with a three-disk RAID 0 array. If I had a fourth disk I would have been able to add some nice redundancy with a RAID 0+1 array. Windows installed faster. Visual Studio is faster. Everything is faster.

If anyone were to read my blog they might point out that I am taking a big risk with my data. If just one of the three disks fails I lose everything. I imagine that data recovery would be difficult since the data is striped across the three drives. To mitigate the risk I don't store any important data on my developement PC. My work is mostly scattered around various online SVN repositories and my media is on a seperate server. If a drive fails the only thing I will lose is a day repaving windows.

So overall I am happy with my new setup. If your motherboard supports RAID why not get out of the slow lane?
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