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Two questions regarding harddrive speed..

D

dubbyah

Limp Gawd
Joined
Sep 12, 2005
Messages
174
If I have two seagate barracudas in a raid array, is it going to be faster accessing info then just one? Is there any advantage to having 2 harddrives? Also, how much of a difference is there in a raptor 10000 rpm vs a sata 7200 rpm drive? I was thinking of getting a 300 gig drive seagate barracuda, but I want the fastest/quietest drive possible that can support 200-300 gigs. It seems to me that 10k drives only support 76 gigs? Thanks for the info!!!!


Edit - To clarify, i guess should ask: I want to buy a single harddrive to use for all my data. What is the fastest/quietest harddrive(s) that I can get that are 250 gig or 300 maybe.
 
Fastest and quietest are at opposite ends of the spectrum ;) You could get a Samsung drive for one end of the spectrum, or a WD or Maxtor for the other end, or Hitachi or Seagate for somewhere in the middle.

My recommendation, though, would be a Maxtor or Seagate with 5 year warranty. Middle of the road.

 
Quietest? Samsung SP P120, 250GB SP2504C. Nobody else comes close. However, performance of Samsung drives is middling at best. They do deliver awesome linear transfer performance (125GB platters), making them an excellent choice for media storage.

Performance? 16MB buffer WD drives (WDxx00Kx). WD is king of the hill performance wise nowadays. The WD4000KD is actually faster than WD740GB (the Raptor) in Office and High-End workstation benchmarks, although WD740GD is still the fastest game loading drive on ATA. WD2500KS is a screamer too, but isn't quite on the same level as WD4000KD because of slightly lower density. Costs about half as much though :p

Maxtor, Seagate and Hitachi are all there too. Hitachi competes really well with Samsung on noise, and delivers much better performance. Seagate is the gold standard for reliability, and their drives can be pretty quiet, as long as you don't get one that is locked in AAM performance mode. Seagate drives are pretty slow though. Maxtor has pretty solid performance, and they make by far the cheapest drives. You can often get a Maxtor drive with a five year warranty and a 16MB buffer for the same price as a competing drive with a 3 year warranty. However, Maxtor drives are plagued by high power consumption.
 
However, the Maxtor drive in that sample has only three platters, compared to five on the 7K400 and four on the 7200.9 and WD4000KD. Maxtor consistently has the highest operating power consumption of all ATA drives.

Maxtor has indeed done a good job on minimizing spinup draw, a commendable effort for a drive targeted at the nearline market that will frequently have large arrays of drives in a single system. However, Maxtor drives require better cooling than any other brand of drives.
 
The samsung 250 gig, how much of a difference in performance is there compared to a hitachi, or another quiet drive... I guess, what would you buy if you had to buy the quietest drive possible but also not super slow.. would it be the samsung? I just dont want to make the wrong choice and have it be too noisy or too slow.. Is it a very noticable difference between a samsung and a WD, or a faster drive? How many seconds loading games? thanks
 
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