Will I notice the difference?

NeuromancerWGDD'U

NeuromancerWGDD'U

New Member
My old hard-drive is coughing up blood, and producing grinding noises that hint of impending doom. As such, I am now in the market for a new hard-drive, but I'm also on a budget :(.

I've been looking at a few hard-drives in the 80-90 dollar range, and I want to know; will I really even see a difference in speed between a drive with an 8.5 ms seek time, and a drive with 8.9 ms seek time? The 8.5 and the 8.9 ms seek time drives seem pretty mixed when it comes to price (almost as if there was no difference between them at all). If it matters, I use my computer for gaming and music -- sometimes at the same time. I also occasionally use it for music editing, but that's more processor/RAM intensive.

As a side-question, what is "NCQ"? I've seen it on a drive I'm considering (I'm pretty darn sure my hardware doesn't support it), but I have no clue as to what it is.

EDIT: I posted a while back about how my PS/2 ports had been tweaking out on me. I figured out why. Somehow, the hard-drive is causing the mouse/keyboard to stop responding/go insane. When it happens, the entire system skips for a second, the hard-drive LED turns solid, and the PS/2 issues start.
 
Last edited:
also i dont think you will actually get those access times, i dont know how they rate them, mine is rated at 8.something i think, and while running HDTach i got an average access time of about 13ms...
 
Alright, well, the decision as to which hard-drive I'm getting has been made. My Dad (he's a nice man, but he honestly doesn't know how to shop very well) got me a 100 gigabyte Maxtor for $110 dollars, $25 dollars more than a faster Hitachi 160 gigabyte drive that I found at Newegg. Oh well, I'm not complaining. All I have to do now is figure out what to do with all this space...can anyone say "Phantom-drives"? (This drive is blazing compared to my ol' clunker)

Thanks for the info on NCQ.
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top