High performance hard drive

mikedeuk

Member
Can anybody recommend a good hard drive?
Im looking for something fast and quiet (Low capacity) to run my OS and a few basic programmes.

Do high spec/speed hard drives have any compatibility issues?
 
Do high spec/speed hard drives have any compatibility issues?
Not unless it's SCSI and even then it's not really a compatability problem.

Most drives are roughly equal. People will tell you go Western Digital or go Seagate or Samsung or whatever brand. When it comes down to it, which ever costs the right amount is probably the way to go. When it comes down to it, only a few drives will fail early in their lifetime.

Performance wise, all current 7200RPM drives will be about equal.
 
Awesome, Thanks alot.

the Hitachi 7K1000.B Hard Drives look to be the right price for me, $89 bucks.

I think i'll RAID a couple of them :)
 
Oh the irony. A Deskstar wouldn't be my first choice, that said I'm pretty sure a friend of mine still has 2 running in RAID0.
 
Yeah, the guys are right about these drives. MTBF are relatively the same. I have been using Seagate since I first got into computers in the 90's. IMHO, Seagate has been reliable to me...bottom line! I am not saying the others are not. I have not used them to form a comparison. I also agree about the buffer question "16 or 32?", 32 if it's not going to break the budget.

I have a motto that I live by...

"If it ain't broken...don't fix it!"

Good Luck my Friend.:cool:
 
Not unless it's SCSI and even then it's not really a compatability problem.

Most drives are roughly equal. People will tell you go Western Digital or go Seagate or Samsung or whatever brand. When it comes down to it, which ever costs the right amount is probably the way to go. When it comes down to it, only a few drives will fail early in their lifetime.

Performance wise, all current 7200RPM drives will be about equal.

not always true though, my 320gb caviar and my 500gb wd black's have about a 15-20mb read difference.
 
not always true though, my 320gb caviar and my 500gb wd black's have about a 15-20mb read difference.
What is the age difference on the 2 drives? (since the model was first released not when you actually bought them)
 
I just want something fast as i don't need much capacity. Would more buffer memory help this? What if i went for something above 7200?:confused:

On a seperate note, Is there anyway i can increase my boot/load speed?
 
You can;t go wrong with the WD Velociraptor 150 gb 10,000 rpm hard drive. If you want the absolute fastest speed in hard drive possible there are 15,000 rpm hard drives! But those are expensive.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822116063

This is as cheap as you can get for this kind of hard drive. It doesn't have much space but then you said that that didn't matter.

Thanks, Sounds good!:) Will it boot my OS faster than a old 7200rpm?
 
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It's not that they are out of date. They did pick up the name Deathstar though and that wasn't because they destroyed other hard drives ;)

They may be better now I haven't really followed them but they tended to fail early in life more often then any other brand.
 
Honestly i used scsi2 for years. the ide's are a lot better now. 10,000 or 15,000 will not make a diffirence for home use. to me a Seagate Barracuda
works fine. though business may be different.

too me, seagate many fine drives. they perform well.
 
Honestly i used scsi2 for years. the ide's are a lot better now. 10,000 or 15,000 will not make a diffirence for home use. to me a Seagate Barracuda
works fine. though business may be different.

too me, seagate many fine drives. they perform well.
What are you talking about? IDE is virtually phased out and SATAII has taken it's place. And for business you could get by with a 5400RPM drive, they usually just use office apps, E-Mail, and web browsing. Now if you mean workstations at say, a CAD company, that's different.

A 15,000RPM SAS hard drive is the most ideal solution if speed is a huge concern.
 
take it easy......this is conversation only.
im not a techie on this subject but do have a little experience.
Everybody is talkig about whats great. nano seconds will not make no diff.
relax...besides, and likely for home use. im just being practical.this stuff is expensive.
 
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take it easy......this is conversation only.
im not a techie on this subject but do have a little experience.
Everybody is talkig about whats great. nano seconds will not make no diff.
relax...besides, and likely for home use. im just being practical.this stuff is expensive.
It's actually milliseconds, not nanoseconds ;)

Your average 7,200 RPM hard drive has an average seek time of 8.9ms, a 10,000 RPM hard drive has an average seek time of 4.2ms, and a 15,000 RPM drive has an average seek time of 3.4ms.

So to somewhat agree with what you said earlier, there isn't a HUGE difference between 10,000 and 15,000 RPM drives, but there is a fairly drastic difference in seek time/latency between a 7,200 and 10,000 RPM drive.
 
Hmm so basically im not going to notice a big difference in performance unless i spend big bucks? Not sure what a SAS drive is:confused:

Any other tips to increase boot speed?
 
SAS is serially attached SCSI. It's a SCSI drive that uses a serial interface instead of the old ribbon chains.
 
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