I need a fast drive.

S

s4rge

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 3, 2003
Messages
459
Not super fast, but right now my hard drive is my bottleneck. I currently have a:
Seagate ST3500641AS-RK Barracuda 7200.9 500GB SATA NCQ Internal Hard Drive
# 500 GB SATA NCQ internal hard drive features SATA with 3 Gbps and Native Command Queuing
# 16 MB cache buffer; 7200 RPM for fast read/write times


Can i get anything faster than this for $60-80 or would i have to spend the big bucks? This is going to be my main OS drive.
Im looking on here: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?page=3&Nav=|c:139|&Sort=4&Recs=10

The only one i see so far is: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...=False&VendorMark=&Keywords=(keywords)&Page=2
 
Hard drives are always a bottleneck. Get a WD6400AAKS or WD6401AALS (32MB cache) and enjoy.
 
You wanna put your OS on a 1.5TB drive? If you want to, sure. I don't know how many platters it has, but I strongly recommend putting your OS on a smaller drive with two or three dense platters. The WD6400AAKS and 6400AALS have two 320GB platters. They're great drives. I have two 6400AKS drives myself, one with my OS.

TB hard drives should be used for storage.
 
GJSNeptune said:
You wanna put your OS on a 1.5TB drive?
Click to expand...
Well i have an os on a 500gb HDD thats partitioned. I just want a faster drive so i can throw this one into my Windows Home server im building. So the new drive will be partitioned and the old 500gb will thrown in the WHS as the only drive till i can add some more.

No i didn't say that backwards. I like most of my stuff on my main pc and the server can store music and crap for the other computers. Plus it'll feel weird just throwing 1tb into the server that wont get used much. I dont have a need for WHS but its something i wanna try out. If i like it than i will buy another drive for the WHS system. Right now the 500gb will do fine :p
 
Or put your OS on one drive and apps and games on another.

Do people still partition to make it easy to reinstall their OS? I thought this practice died awhile ago. It's not hard to keep your installation clean, responsive, and free of malware. I don't reinstall unless I build a new computer and use a new hard drive. It's pretty easy to transfer app and game files.

If you still like partitions, go ahead and slap your OS onto a whopping 1.5TB drive, but I still recommend the 640GB drives I've listed above. Plenty of room for games, apps, and media. Then get a 1-1.5TB drive for storing media and creating pseudo-backups of data.
 
Well, if you set yourself a budget of 60-80 bux, then the WD 640 drive is the best drive in that category with a great mix of speed vs capacity. For the price of the 1.5 Seagate (with lots of firmware issues BTW) you could get 2 of the 640s and RAID 0 them and have a smokin fast setup. If you have a Matrix controller on yer MOBO, you can short stroke the OS partition to say 100 gig, and have a drive with access times comparable to a Vraptor.

But you seem to have made up your mind on the 1.5 TB Seagate.

Don
 
GJSNeptune said:
Or put your OS on one drive and apps and games on another.

Do people still partition to make it easy to reinstall their OS? I thought this practice died awhile ago. It's not hard to keep your installation clean, responsive, and free of malware. I don't reinstall unless I build a new computer and use a new hard drive. It's pretty easy to transfer app and game files.

If you still like partitions, go ahead and slap your OS onto a whopping 1.5TB drive, but I still recommend the 640GB drives I've listed above. Plenty of room for games, apps, and media. Then get a 1-1.5TB drive for storing media and creating pseudo-backups of data.
Click to expand...

Well i partition because i have more than one OS. http://img183.imageshack.us/img183/9509/vista.jpg

But back to the thread. Which drive is faster. The 640gb you listed or the 1tb. That is the question that im wondering the answer to right now.

Thanks
 
For dual/triple/etc. booting, giving each OS its own hard drive is better. But you could also make it really easy and virtualize them.
 
GJSNeptune said:
For dual/triple/etc. booting, giving each OS its own hard drive is better. But you could also make it really easy and virtualize them.
Click to expand...

;) I know. The way im thinking now is: If its not broke than why fix it. Right now the partition setup is working fine for me. Just want a faster drive the current seagate i have now. So far you stated the 640gb one is pretty faster and it has excellent reviews on newegg. Now i know the 1tb is bigger but it has 32mb cache. Does that make a difference in the speed over the 640gb.
 
Not sure how many platters the 1+TB drives have. But they're out of your budget, right?
 
GJSNeptune said:
Not sure how many platters the 1+TB drives have. But they're out of your budget, right?
Click to expand...

Im out of my budget but i do have cash just sitting around. So yes and no. If its faster than the 640gb than i will spend the extra 40-50 to pick it up @ the Tigerdirect 25 minutes away from me.

so im thinking about just ordering the WD6401AALS like you suggested. Make the WD6401AALS as my main drive and add the 500gb to my WHS than buy the 1tb later.
 
s4rge said:
;) I know. The way im thinking now is: If its not broke than why fix it. Right now the partition setup is working fine for me. Just want a faster drive the current seagate i have now. So far you stated the 640gb one is pretty faster and it has excellent reviews on newegg. Now i know the 1tb is bigger but it has 32mb cache. Does that make a difference in the speed over the 640gb.
Click to expand...

16 MB seems to be the point of diminishing returns on on board HD cache. Yea, the 32 MB versions might do slightly better in some benchies, but you will notice no difference in the wild.

Certainly not worth paying extra just for the extra cache.

Don
 
DonDon said:
16 MB seems to be the point of diminishing returns on on board HD cache. Yea, the 32 MB versions might do slightly better in some benchies, but you will notice no difference in the wild.

Certainly not worth paying extra just for the extra cache.

Don
Click to expand...

So im thinking about just ordering the WD6401AALS from newegg like GJSNeptune suggested. Make the WD6401AALS my main drive and add the 500gb to my WHS than buy the 1tb later for the WHS if i like it.

Sounds about perfect right now.''
Thank you, kind sirs
 
GJSNeptune said:
Or put your OS on one drive and apps and games on another.

Do people still partition to make it easy to reinstall their OS? I thought this practice died awhile ago. It's not hard to keep your installation clean, responsive, and free of malware. I don't reinstall unless I build a new computer and use a new hard drive. It's pretty easy to transfer app and game files.

If you still like partitions, go ahead and slap your OS onto a whopping 1.5TB drive, but I still recommend the 640GB drives I've listed above. Plenty of room for games, apps, and media. Then get a 1-1.5TB drive for storing media and creating pseudo-backups of data.
Click to expand...


I DO!

50 GB OS partition running on a RAID 0 set of velociraptors.

Thinking back. SHould have done 128 GB SSD drives.. oh well. These are pretty damn fast, not so loud!
 
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