Affordable fast drives?

D

Dario D.

Gawd
Joined
Dec 8, 2004
Messages
582
Hi all. I'm looking to buy a fast HD (for recording videos straight out of games - something that is currently bottlenecked like crazy by my slow drives) but everything in the 15,000 RPM department at the Egg is either too small or too expensive.

Are there any affordable drives that are significantly faster than my WD 200gb Caviar? (I assume it's a fairly typical 7200 RPM drive - certainly not a "fast" drive in any sense)
I don't need anything as fast as a WD Raptor or the like (which I say simply because they are so expensive) but something noticeably better than what I have would be a great benefit.

Thanks. :)
 
I take it your drive right now is a 7200rpm drive.
Well the next step up in the rpm sector would be 10000rpm. Thats where the raptors lie.
If you don't want/ need anything as fast as a raptor then you have basically the fastest drive your going to get (depending on the specs of your current drive).

Also, whats with the mention of 15k drives. Also, if you were going that route you'd most likely need a controller card.

Hope that helps
Bob

Ps- Are you sure it's the drive thats your bottle neck?
 
The Seagate 7200.10's are the fastest you are going to get before you move up to the Raptors @ 10k RPM anything faster than that and you will need a controller card.
 
Both of WD's new 750gb offerings are actually competitive with the Raptor in most performance benchmarks. The SE16 is fairly affordable as well, from a $/gb standpoint ($180-190ish for 750gb).

Hitachi's 1TB drive also is blazing fast, but significantly more ($300+).
 
Argher said:
Both of WD's new 750gb offerings are actually competitive with the Raptor in most performance benchmarks. The SE16 is fairly affordable as well, from a $/gb standpoint ($180-190ish for 750gb).

Hitachi's 1TB drive also is blazing fast, but significantly more ($300+).
Click to expand...

Ah, thank you (and everyone else). That is quite a nice-looking drive, according to this benchmark, as you mentioned: http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3061

But now I'm a bit confused. Are the seek-time/write-time/latency specs on Newegg NOT directly relevant to speed? Example:
- Average Latency: 4.2ms
- Average Seek Time: 8.9ms
- Average Write Time: 10.9ms

The Raptor's specs look almost twice as good (especially write time), but the real-world difference isn't that drastic:
- Average Latency: 2.99ms
- Average Seek Time: 4.6ms
- Average Write Time: 5.2ms
 
Dario D. said:
But now I'm a bit confused. Are the seek-time/write-time/latency specs on Newegg NOT directly relevant to speed?
Click to expand...

There are two types of speed,

1. Speed that a hard drive can write or read a file, measured in mb/s

2. Speed that a hard drive can find a file, measured in ms (milliseconds)
 
How much space do you need? You could do a small RAID array.
 
At least 500 gb for the new drive (which will add on to the ones I have). I have 2 drives that total 450 gb together, but they are constantly overloaded, and I have to delete stuff all the time. Lots of raw video footage, among other things.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top