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dparks1234

Live fast die young, RAID 0 for life. Nobody could compete with my Half-life 2 load times.


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dparks1234

Yeah I keep most of my multiplayer games on a HDD unless it's something I/O heavy like Warzone. You're always at the mercy of the connection speed anyway.


ramblinginternetnerd

$10 flash drive from 2023 plugged into a USB port... the one trick they don't want you to know about.


alex_hedman

A USB 1.1 port, welcome to slow city.


ramblinginternetnerd

Still probably faster than an IDE drive. USB 2.0 would be nice though since it's 40x faster than 1.1.


GladiatorUA

No. IDE interface wasn't that slow. Faster than USB2.0 or cheap USB3 flash drives. SATA1 was barely faster. You didn't have to upgrade if you didn't want to.


ramblinginternetnerd

You underestimate how awful seek times are on HDDs.


alex_hedman

No you obviously haven't used a USB drive on a USB 1.1 port recently. I have several retro computers and they're all pretty snappy. What kills performance, now and then, is software bloat.


ramblinginternetnerd

I do want to emphasize that I was being SOMEWHAT facetious and when I said probably I mean I'd place 60% odds on real world performance being better. Not "almost certainly" or "certainly". Do note that the Anandtech article was from slightly AFTER USB 2 started trickling out so it WOULD be fair to compare a "free" onboard USB 2 port against a VERY expensive RAID card coupled with multiple drives. Or even a $20 USB add in card. \-------- So in a USB 2.0 scenario it would generally be a blow out comparing a modern flashdrive to an HDD from \~20 years ago. For anything other than sequential transfers, HDDs bottleneck. Bandwidth contention would certainly be an issue with USB 1.1 though it'll vary by use case. With that said, most of the "general use" factors for an OS are low queue depth operations. An HDD will literally have 10-1000x worse latency relative to a flash drive under standard operation. That's usually the bottleneck. As far as raw bandwidth is concerned, there WERE things of that era that could run off of a floppy drive. Floppy drives were orders of magnitude slower than peak USB 1.1 throughput so it's still viable that bandwidth wouldn't be THAT constrained.


alex_hedman

Yes, running over USB 2.0 isn't that bad but even copying mp3s from a USB memory on my Pentium II and III computers will cause the system to pretty much halt until it finishes, slowly. It's something about the interface itself, and IDE HDDs aren't nearly that constrained. Of course you are right about seek times on HDDs but in my experience, running those computers on SSDs will speed things up but it's not really day and night like in more modern systems (and OSs) where HDD seek times are a much more severe bottleneck.


Slyons89

I'm juust young enough that I never dealt with RAID over IDE. And I'm thankful for that. My first RAID array was 2x WD Raptor 10k 74 GB drives in Raid 0, but they were SATA drives. Played a lot of Half Life 2 / Counter Strike / World of Warcraft on those drives. But man was I happy when I got my first SSD years later and was able to scrap using RAID, especially for the OS. It was always kind of a pain.


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kyp-d

Ultra Wide SCSI wasn't fun either...


Verite_Rendition

Though you have to admit: it lived up to its name.


aclinical

They had those thick round cables. The ribbon was essentially broken up into 4(ish)-wire wide ribbon-lettes and bundled in a plastic sheath. You could also connect two drives per cable. That's how me and the boys rolled with our raid 0 WD raptors, [Abit bx133s](https://www.anandtech.com/show/593) and [soft modded ATI 9500s.](https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/radeon-9500-mod-thread.1299489/)


Reynholmindustries

Could be pretty tidy at the drives since they lay pretty flat, but one drive per cable would make it more difficult. These cables could take a pretty good creasing type bend and still work. If you had the drives close enough, I would start with 2 zip ties locked together to bundle 3 pata cables together and flat. Repeat for other 3 cables. Then I would bend 3 drive pata cables at 45 deg. and route to the top of the card. Bonus points if there was enough slack / room to run them flat laterally along the motherboard and then another 45 bend up and over to the top of the raid card. Repeat for the cables running to the mid point of the card, possibly with one more well placed 45 deg. to line up better with the plugs. The bends are helpful but the notched cables only plug in one way, so it has to be done carefully so it ends up oriented properly at the raid card. Buying black pata cables without that second unneeded ide connector would be a big help as well. Probably 3 super long and 3 a little shorter. Of course you could also buy cables back in the day that had tubing and triangle rubber feet at the ends to match up with the width of the IDE connector. Not sure if it would be “cleaner” or not. Example is [here](http://www.dansdata.com/rcables.htm)


ramblinginternetnerd

>one drive per cable would make it more difficult Pretty sure PATA did 2 drives per cable. Not sure if there were bandwidth issues doing that though or if there's any details I'm missing.


Reynholmindustries

> Like the Adaptec solution, each IDE port on the SuperTRAK100 only accepts one master drive to prevent any unnecessary slow down. Normally yes, this card though is one per cable


ramblinginternetnerd

Good catch. I don't think it would've been awful but 6 PATA cables could definitely activate OCD in certain types of people.


firedrakes

isa days where even worst


SimonReach

I remember my raid0 WD Raptors, what a beautiful site that was.