Current drives vs older? Any drastic performance benefits?

[enyceexdanny]

Hey guys. Recently I've upgraded most of my parts. Well all of them except the psu and hard drives.

Since the hard drive is the biggest bottleneck of the system, I wanted to know just by how much performance has improved compared to the last generation.

Below are the hard drives I'm running at the moment:

2 x 200gb maxtor sata (8mb cache) drives in Raid0
2 x 200gb wd caviar sata (8mb)
1 x 250gb wd caviar ide (8mb)

In terms of real world performance, does the new drives (e.g. high density perpendicular) offer any kind of improvements? Especially when it comes to general windows operations and such.

If so, which hard drives would you guys recommend?
If I was to upgrade, I was thinking in the means of setup below:

2 (or just 1) WD Raptor 150gb for the OS
2 x 500gb (16mb cache) or just 1 x 1tb hitachi (32mb cache) drive

And how are the manufacturers comparing lately?
The last time I was into hard drive researching, seagate was the leader when it came to the overall performance and reliability.

Thanks ^_^

[enyceexdanny]

Anyone? O_o

[Ockie]

You are going to see some improvements but it will depend highly on what you are doing. Just don't expect to see a day to night difference... because it wont be that drastic.

If you want to modernize, get yourself a nice large drive and sell off those smaller drives, it will save you power, money, and you will have that added speed. A 750gb drive these days runs you about 179 bucks... so it's not bad at all.

[drizzt81]

generally newer drives perform better than older ones. Increases in storage density usually yield higher STRs and also reduce the search distance, provided that the data set size stays constant. Reduced search distances yield reduced search times.

How `drastic' the difference is depends a lot on the load that you are putting on the drives as well as how many generations lie between the ones that you'd like to compare.

[enyceexdanny]

Cool, thanks for both of your responses. =)

[Whatsisname]

In general, a <certian shelf> drive of today will beat a similar <certain shelf> drive of yesterday. If you include other variables it becomes harder, a top shelf SCSI disk of two years ago might still be superior to some two day old bottom shelf POS budget drive, but obviously thats not a very fair comparison.

But basically, newer is faster, but not hugely faster as with processing performance.