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Errr... two quick questions.

T

Toilet Duck

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 22, 2005
Messages
190
I'll try to keep this brief, since I couldn't think of a nice title...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144363
vs.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144359

I've yet to shop around and find the best prices, but I'm wondering if this is a trend. According to the stickied buying guide at the top, these are the same drive, with the Maxline just having a better warranty? If that's the case, is there a... uh.. good reason for it to be 15 bucks cheaper to boot?

Second, much much sillier and ill-informed question: How much performance is gained by having a less filled hard drive? Meaning, is there any inherent speed loss at 25% / 50% / 75% capacity? If not, I'm seriously considering just grabbing one of these for everything, instead of spending an extra 160+ getting a Raptor for just the games...
 
It could be as simple as when Newegg made the purchase, or how many they bought and the deal they got.

It's been my experience that the more data on a drive the slower the seek/access times. If it's a storage only drive I don't view it as an issue. When it's my OS and main progy drive I try to keep it as clean as possible, within reason of course ;)
 
A drive with less data on it will be faster than a drive with more data on it, presuming that the drive fills in order from the faster outer zones to the slower inner zones and frgamentation is kept to a minimum, for two reasons:

A) On the dirve that has less space in use, a higher percentage of the data is in the drive's fastest outer zones, rewarding you with higher transfer rates on the data that is accessed.
B) The drive must seek over a smaller area of the disk with less data, rewarding you with better seek performance on random workloads (track to track localized seeks for individual tasks won't improve much if at all though)

This is the whole idea of "short-stroking" a disk. You write off the slowest portion of the capacity to makes seeks shorter and leverage the pprtions of the physical media with the higher transfer rates. If throughput is the only concern and you have money to burn, it may make sense on a boot/program drive, as Bill suggested. However, on storage drives, it is gnerally consdiered a waste of cash to throw away capacity

As for the pricing difference between the DM10 and MLIII drives on Newegg, they may be capitalizing on the DM10's market recognition. ZZF exhibits the same phenomenon, although ironically enough, the presumably more expensive to produce RoHS SKU for the DM10 is less than the SKU you linked (which does not meet RoHS specs, but is otherwise identical) I dunno why, but it definitely works to your advantage. Take the extra warranty and cash to the bank :)
 
Ah, thanks for the replies. Guess I'll grab that deal and then use it as an excuse to squander way more cash than I saved on some other component. Score!

Edit: Argh, I just thought of one other question. How much faster is a Raptor than one of these Maxtors? I mean.. I can tell that latency/seek times are lower and whatnot, but the Maxes have twice the cache... argh.
 
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