HDD bottleneck?

[ChefOfDeath]

I'm planning on upgrading to 4 gigs of RAM soon, mainly for my eventual upgrade to Vista 64 bit. I currently have 2 gigs of RAM, and what I'm wondering is: will I actually see any performance improvement with 4 gigs over 2 gigs? My concern is that the hard drive (Seagate 7200rpm SATA II) might bottleneck data flow so that the extra RAM wouldn't be adding anything. Would this be the case?

Edit: I am unable to do RAID on my motherboard, but I could get a RAID add-on card (if I did, it would be PCI express x1). I'm not sure how much that would help, though, because then wouldn't the drives be bottlenecked by the speed of the PCIe bus?

 

[vanka]

It seems that 32-bit versions of windows are not able to see all 4GB of memory. Here's the MS KB article on why.

 

[Fedor]

Yup that's totally true so only bother with the RAM once you actually move to Vista. *Shudder*

As for getting a PCIe x1 addon card, it can yield a performance boost. PCIe x1 is capable of 250mb/s on paper so unless we are talking something like a 4 drive RAID0 array, you won't be hitting that ceiling.

 

[byrddogg77]

I am not sure you fully read the MS artical. It depends on the hardware you have and/or the type of processor. Windows will recognize 8mb of physical RAM, if you have the correct Hardware.

 

[Fedor]

I dont need to read it - the only omission I made is that I didn't explicity state that I was referring to 32bit Windows, which is what I assume he has now.

 

[tomwaddle]

I have to know your setup since you have or plannin on using SATA drives but the MOBO doesn't support a RAID. Or do you have one implemented now that you can't break?