One of the Frequently Asked Questions, of almost every week is how can I make TF or any of our Apps run Faster.

Well, there are a number of ways, but when it comes to large file sizes and large amounts of compounds there is only one proven way to “Kick it up a notch!”

RAID!!! Now, as a chemist I had no idea of what this was, but I soon found out. This is a function that’s built into the PCs that ship with all our instruments. This is allows data to be written across multiple drives and then accessed from those multiple drives. Thereby speeding up the read/write processing to the data. Now having a 4 drive system does not buy you 4 times the speed. But, most likely you can get 3x out of the system.

Also using high speed drives such as the Western Digital RAPTOR drives that have a spin rate of 10,000RPM will increase your data access. Most of the time I’ve seen a 20% decrease in processing time. Dependent on file size.

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Types of RAID

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RAID Zero is the fastest but most definitely the risk is higher. There is not backup redundant disk. RAID 10 is still fast but it does give you the safety of making a backup copy of each disk so if one fails you can still recover the data. So if you don’t do a backup of data regularly RAID 10 is most likely the best way to go.

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What I personally tested as my fastest reliable configuration to date is as follows below:

“As the most simple RAID I used two Western Digital Velciraptor hish speed drives. 4 gigs of ram, and used the Dell T3500 mother board to configure the Raid, you can always use an INTEL raid controller for better performance. These fit into the PCI Express ports. These typically have a processor of their own and between 64 and 128 megs of onboard memory. ”

Happy Quan!