Help with hard drive decision

P

PcPeter

New Member
After doing some reading about hard drives for my soon to be made computer purchase, I find I still lack the information necessary to decide.

I found this informative board and would like to get some of your suggestions.

As I understand it, the main difference between a 7200 rpm and 10k rpm drive is in loading programs, and not in the operation of these programs?

How much faster is a 10k rpm drive loading programs than a 7200 rpm drive, expressed in percentage or other easy to compare guide? I have seen too many "faster" which is useless as a comparison.

Would the faster drive be advantageous in loading large photo and video files?

Would it be possible, and easy, to convert a single or separate double drive system to a RAID system in the future, assuming I have all the required components?

Is is easy to convert a RAID 0 system to a RAID 1 system if I decide to switch at some point?
 
sadly, 10,000 rpm hard drives are not ridiculously faster than 7,200rpm hard drives.

it really only speeds up the lookup time and not really the bandwidth so much. in my opinion getting two cooler hard drives that have good performance and running them in a raid 0 array is a better idea. its also much cheaper.

its like saying you walk to your car and then you drive to work. walking to your car takes 30 seconds and driving to work takes 15mins. well, adding the extra RPM cuts down the 30 seconds to be 20-25 seconds and then you need to wait in traffic to get to work. its the same with the sata bandwidth and how fast the drive reads.

here are some charts though.. to help you decide on which drive to get.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/hard-disks/workstation-i-o-benchmark-pattern,674.html

you'll notice the western digital veloci raptor outperforms for most of the tests... but its 10,000rpm, it runs hot (it has its own heatsink if i remember correctly) and it comes with a hefty price-tag. in my opinion one of the seagate barracuda 7200.11 model hard drives is probably the best bang for your buck if you really want a fast hard drive. run it in raid 0 too, then you'll really see windows and other applications load fast. i know i noticed, look at my system specs lol
 
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