Fastest HDD?

G

Gutspiller

Gawd
Joined
Oct 19, 2005
Messages
576
I'm looking for the fastest hdd configuration I can do with hard drives and not solid state or SCSI.

What do I need to look for? I'm interested in more in the type of drive I need to buy, and then I will worry about raid and how many I want to having running together, but as far as a single drive that I will raid sooner or later, what is it?

Thanks.
 
Are all raptors the same as far as speed or are there other specs I need to be concerned about?
 
Forget the Raptors. They are slower (for single user desktop applications) than the newest 7200rpm drives, and there is supposedly a new, faster Raptor in the works.

You want the 320GB/platter based drives from WD or the 334GB/platter based drives from Samsung. They have the fastest sequential transfers of any 7200rpm drive. Their seek times are not as fast as the Raptor but for a single-user desktop workload, seek times matters about as much as what Britney Spears had for breakfast this morning.

The WD 640GB uses the 320GB platters, and they have a 320GB model that does as well, but the 320GB is kind of a gamble because theres also a version with the older platters and it has the same model number. The Samsung F1 1TB uses the 334GB platters, and I believe they are coming out with a few smaller drives based on it as well. (The 750GB does _not_ use the new platters.)

My personal recommendation would be the WD 640GB WD6400AAKS. Then if you want to get the new Raptors when and if they come out, go for it then. No sense buying Raptors based on several year old drive technology at this point in time.
 
Here are some terribly raw stats in German comparing the new WD 640GB drive to the Hitachi GST Deskstar T7K500 500GB 2x250GB platter drive.
http://www.planet3dnow.de/vbulletin/showthread.php?p=3530851

WD Drive 640GB
Min 51.9 MB/s
Max 118.5 MB/s
Avg 98.4 MB/s

Hitachi Drive 500GB
Min 35.4 MB/s
Max 74.2 MB/s
Avg 61.0 MB/s

My WD 500GB (WD5000AAKS)
Min 37.1 MB/s
Max 84 MB/s
Avg 64 MB/s.

The new 640GB drive thoroughly whoops them !!
 
SSD drives....... period....not only speed but how can you beat the seek times.


http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=530580


Single Mtron 32GB solid state drive vs. single raptor 74gig:
MTRONvRAPTOR.jpg
 
I looked into SSD and they are $900+ dollars. You wanna find me better prices that have the same performance? I alreayd looked into them and that's why in my first post I said no SSD.

I did find this: http://www.techreport.com/articles.x/14380/5

Which I don't really know what to make of it. There are so many drives tested. I just want what's best for load times, OS usage and game / level loading. I really am not looking to go anywhere but WD / Seagate / Maxtor as those are the only ones I really trust.

From what I can see I don't know that I need to upgrade my HDD. I currently have the Seagate Barracuda 750 GB 7200.10

From the looks of that techreport review I'm not doing to bad if I understand the comparisons correctly.

All solid state drives I've seen still get you booted up in over a minute. Thats ridiculous considering it's completely memory. From solid state drives I would expect nothing longer than 10 to 15 seconds and only surely not 1000 dollars for 32 GB.

If someone can help me make heads or tails of the techreport comparison though, that could help, but I think from what I have right now, I don't really need to upgrade for any real speed boost, right?
 
Well the thing to remember about hard drive speed is this... it matters very little for gaming. Its not like you spend a lot of time reading from your hard drive, and as you saw in that TechReport review, level loading times do not scale real well based on hard drive speed. (Theres a lot more that goes on than just copying the files into memory.)

The only time you're going to notice your hard drive's speed is when you're copying files around. And as you saw on TechReport there in the File Copy Test, that means raw transfer rate, which means the WD 640GB. It is about 50% faster than your 'cuda in copying files around.
 
NKDietrich said:
Well the thing to remember about hard drive speed is this... it matters very little for gaming. Its not like you spend a lot of time reading from your hard drive, and as you saw in that TechReport review, level loading times do not scale real well based on hard drive speed. (Theres a lot more that goes on than just copying the files into memory.)

The only time you're going to notice your hard drive's speed is when you're copying files around. And as you saw on TechReport there in the File Copy Test, that means raw transfer rate, which means the WD 640GB. It is about 50% faster than your 'cuda in copying files around.
Click to expand...

True, I think with my other upgrades I'm doing I can put to rest that I need a new hard drive. Thanks for pointing that out. It is nice to know at least that I shouldn't always be searching for raptor on hard drives when I'm looking for SATA speed.

I think this post can be laid to rest, I'm satisfied with my current HDD speed... for now. :D
 
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