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A few questions about HDD's

S

SAW

[H]ard|Gawd
Joined
Nov 13, 2005
Messages
1,467
Hello all....

Im slowly buying up all the parts needed for a decent gamin puter.....

Now, its time to order a HD. I dont know a whole lot about computers and tech stuff, but have a friend who is a programmer who helps me out from time to time. He says Maxtor brand is just fine. So I was going to get one, but then read a sticky here in this forum about how Maxtor wasnt all that great (or at least a particular HD). So, I started lookin at WD HD's.

Question 1.) Is Maxtor an OK brand to get, or is it WD all the way?

In my current system, which is very old (800mhz). I have an 80gig Maxtor. Never had a problem with it, that im aware of anyways. Ive barely scratched the surface of using up its capacity. So, why get anything of larger storage space? Well, my buddy says, once I have my HIGH END computer built and he introduces me to BitTurrent, im going to be glad I got a 300mb HD.

So, I went lookin at 300 and 320 drives.

As I said, im building a high end'er here, so I want the BEST. Or at least DAMN GOOD. So, I started lookin at the 16mb cache drives. Not too bad a price, about $150 on average. So, Ok, Ill get that. My friend asked "Why get the 16mb cache?" Well, I didnt have an answer other than its the next best thing to a 8mb cache. I had read somewhere that you want as much cache as you can get.

Question 2.) What the hell is cache and why "would" I want 16mb of it?

Question 3.) Should I just get 2 HD's? Each 150 and use one as a master and one as a slave or should I just stick with a 300+ and partition it?


TIA for any replies...Im sure Ill have more questions later :)
 
Adding cache is the single biggest thing an HDD maker can do to improve desktop performance, and it is extremely low cost (unlike raising spindle speed or reducing seek performance). The next biggest thing that HDD makers can do to boost performance on their desktop drives is to increase platter density, which has the added benefit of making the drive bigger :cool:

So yes bigger drives with bigger caches are faster, all other things being equal.

As for Maxtor vs WD, Maxtor tends to be cheaper and performance is about equal, but Maxtor drives draw more power and generate more heat.
 
1) Maxtor is good. Get a good power supply (check the PSU forum stickies) and you'll be fine.

2) Cache is memory on a hard drive, essentially. Thus, if you ask for a chunk of data twice in a short time, it'll have it stored in cache and return it right away rather than wait for the disk to get to the right place and the head over the data.

3) 2 hard drives will be a little faster for some things, so if your budget allows, you might get a "os+games" disk and a "storage" disk, or maybe a "os+storage" disk and a "games" disk, depending on how your usage pattern is (that is, how much storage you use for media and such).

 
Thanks for the replies guys.....

So then I guess I will get the 16mb cache 320gb.

I dont use alot of mulitimedia stuff really. I very rarely listen to or download any music and have never downloaded a movie. All I do basically is play my games (WoW) and surf.

The PSU im lookin at getting is the Antec TruePower 2 550watt.

Thanks for the replies......

If there is anything else I should know about, like what to NOT get or something, please let me know :D.
 
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