Fastest single hard drive?

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Uncle Humjaba

Limp Gawd
Joined
May 6, 2006
Messages
440
Hey all,

I have a 1tb caviar black, and i'm happy with the speed, but (believe it or not) I'm running out of space between OS and storage of stuff. So I'd like to get another hard drive to run just my OS with programs and keep this one for storage.

Whats the fastest 7200rpm drive out there? (Raptors are too expensive, and SSD's are WAAY too expensive)
 
Not that good actually. IIRC, the WD 500GB Black uses 250GB platters. In addition, the WD 500GB is a poor buy considering that the slightly faster WD6401AALS and WD6400AAKS can be had for the same price
 
some of the reviews are showing the 500GB WD has 75MB/s average? my single 640 is 90-100 average.
 
I had the 750GB Black drive (3x250GB platters) and it had an avg 75MB/s avg.

Get the 640GB WD black or another 1TB WD black.

Why get a Seagate with only 3 year warranty?
 
Intel SSD.
But that doesnt help the space problem very much. ;)
 
seagate aint 5 yrs no more? They're using their maxtor warranty?
 
My 640GB WD Black (WD6401AALS) has performed well as an OS drive... Unfortunately it's soon to be retired from said duties as I just ordered an 80GB X25-M G2 SSD. :D I don't care that the cost per GB is still like 3.5x the cost per GB of a regular HDD, after having experienced the speed I was a convert, heh. I don't need that much space for an OS partition and my favorite games anyway...
 
The new 2TB 7200RPM Black WD drive or the WD RE4 NON GP. (The RE4 GP is actually pretty fast too but the non GP is faster.)

RE4 is very expensive tho.

slower
WD 2TB Green = 32MB Cache ~5900 RPM
WD 2TB RE4 Green Power = 64MB Cache ~5900 RPM
WD 2TB Black = 64MB Cache 7200 RPM
WD 2TB RE4 = 64MB Cache 7200 RPM
faster

The Seagate 7200.11 and 7200.12''s are also pretty fast but I don't know off the top of my head exactly where they slot in that list.
 
The WD drives are 5400rpm, not 5900rpm. Only Seagate has drives with 5900rpm.
 
This is all kind of moot imo, you'd be hard pressed to notice any huge differences in performance amongst modern 7200 RPM drives with similarly sized platters.
 
Pkirk618 said:
seagate aint 5 yrs no more? They're using their maxtor warranty?
Click to expand...

yep they ingested a huge poison pill called maxtor, its been down hill since then :)

The overall top speed numbers on graphs do not really show the difference in using a SSD. good ones (non jmicron) will show you a huge difference when actually using them, for instance when you load an operating system or large program many small files are written and read, this is really slow on mechanical drives and you DO notice it, big time. i just got a 60GB OCZ agility (because it was on a daily special on NCIX when i was buying something else and im stupid that way), using it just for windows and programs, data is on WD black.

The difference is bigger than any upgrade I have ever done. i just open and close big programs instead of leaving them idling, booting is faster than coming out of standby was. coming out of standby takes as long at my monitor takes to come back on :)

Have a look at "filemon" when opening a big program and you will see all the rubbish that drives have to deal with.
 
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Uncle Humjaba said:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136320 look good?
Basically looking for the largest single-platter drive out there, right?
Click to expand...

Actually, given equivalent bit density, multi-platter drives should be faster than single-platter drives for random data access, since the heads don't have to travel as far to cover a given number of blocks.

For example, in a drive with two 500GB platters configured to have two 500GB partitions, the first (outer) partition will be faster for both seeks and data transfer than a drive with a single 500GB platter. The inner partition will have faster seek times, but not faster data transfer.
 
Blue Fox said:
The WD drives are 5400rpm, not 5900rpm. Only Seagate has drives with 5900rpm.
Click to expand...

Well, according to WD, each green drive uses a unique non-variable rpm between 5400 and 7200. Math has shown it to be close to 5400 rpm, but we dont know for sure...
 
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