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I was thinking about buying a new 100 gig hard drive, and I wanted to know if 7200 rpms is a good speed. I know the seek speed is 9ms and that is fairly standard, but I don't know how good 7200 rpms would be on a 100 gigabyte hard drive. How would that be? Is that a good speed?
If you can afford it, go for a 10,000 rpm drive. Otherwise, 7,200 rpm is the next best thing.
Cheers,
cgkanchi
Yeah, but will it take long to access what I need? Will 7200 rpms be fairly fast, or will I have to wait for all my apps to load on startup and stuff? Will I have a hard time uploading big files?
Can't anybody help me?
7,200 is the best you'll get at a reasonable price. If you're looking for fast seek times and transfer rates, you're going to want to look for harddrives with extra cache (such as the new Western Digital SE drives which have 8 MB of cache). You'll still have to wait, though... even with today's technology, harddrives can't achieve transfer rates or seek times anywhere near that of the RAM let alone the processor. If you want a really fast harddrive, you're going to have to wait until the new Serial ATA hard drives come out in a few years.
AJ
Yeah but is 7200rpms a good speed? Or will I be annoyed at clicking-hearing the hd start to whir-and then getting what i wanted?
A website or company did test on the 100-140GB HD awhile back using 5400 and 7200RPM. 7200 is fairly fast enough in the market today and it also depends on what brand you get. Dont wanna get generic stuff, wont last long.
Hard drives will always make noise, no matter what speed you get. 7,200 will definately wind up faster than the 5,400 and will, therefore make more noise doing such. I have 7,200s in nearly all of my machines and when I first turn them on or wake them up, there are some noises (such as the winding up), but the clicking has all but disappeared from new drives, even for the 5,400 ones. The technology itself is what generates the noises you're complaining about. When the disks are at a stopped state, and data is requested from them, they must start up to the speed at which they are set to be run (i.e. 7,200 rpm). You'll never get around that. That's also why a lot of the new, high speed CD-ROM drives make a lot of noise when you first enter a CD... because the drive tries to get it spinning at it's maximum rate right away. So, all in all, the 7,200 will probably suit your needs and should be as quiet as it's going to get.
AJ
Azn_Acid... do you mean 100-120? I was under the impression that current technology is keeping hard drives at a maximum of 137 GB. I may be wrong on this, though. Let me know...
AJ
NO, no! I wasn't complaining about the sound, I don't care about the sound of the hd! :) Hehe, I just meant will I have to wait a while to get info when I open a document? Will I have to click and then wait 30 seconds for kazaa to open? (I don't actually use kazaa)
I was rounding.....sry to mislead all of you.
Oh, sorry for misunderstanding. lol (Oops). To answer the correct question: I would have to say yes and no. You will always have to wait when you open a file... that has to do with not only the speed of the harddisk, but the RAM and the CPU as well. If you have a ATA/133MB/s drive (with a motherboard that supports transfers at that speed), with a large amount of cache, this process will definately be faster, but never (at least not with current technology) instantaneous. As for starting Kazaa, I am assuming you're asking about the way that it searches your specified folders for new files to share when you start the program... depending on the number of files you have, this may take a long time or a short time. I personally have no wait because, first off, I don't share any folders with anyone, and secondly, the download folder I use (which is what is searched when you start the program) is always empty. Hope that answers your question.
AJ
No need to be sorry, azn_acid. I was just wondering 'cuz I was excited I could start buying larger drives. :-) As I said, though, I may be wrong. I just didn't think that they had been able to get around the current ATA limitations yet (at least not feasibly).
AJ
Thanks azn, I am gonna buy western digital though. Adven, how mean of you not to share. I guess I am gonna try it out with 7200rpm, and if its slow, I'll just post crap all over my site about how it sucks. Thanks guys.
I would share, but I don't really have anything useful to share. I usually hop onto KaZaA to check out a few songs to ensure that I'm not wasting my money buying a CD because I like one or two songs which I heard on the radio. Once I'm satisfied (or dissatisfied) with the songs, I remove them and make my purchasing decision. I don't have any songs or programs which I could share.
AJ
Western Digital: Good.
Maxtor: Slower than Western although same space and speed.
Don't remember what website, it was about a few months ago that I read it.
That reminds me, I need more space. thx for reminding me.
correct me if im wrong;
i always believed that 7200 was the fastest you can get on ide, and anything faster was a raid
What is a raid?
It's a different configuration type than IDE (ATA) offer. There are multiple forms for RAID, usually attributed to SCSI drives. It basically allows for redundancy between drives. My servers have U160 RAID-5 configurations. Below is a link where you can learn everything you want to know about RAID.
http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html
AJ
Spirit: I think you have your terms somewhat mixed up. Generally, RAID refers simply to the configuration of the drives, not the rpms at which the drive runs. SCSI drives can run at higher rpms than IDE drives (many are 10,000 rpms, while the max on IDEs is 7,200). Hope that clarifies a little. See the link above for more info about RAID.
AJ