Stephen Austin wrote:
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 19:21:58 GMT, CJT wrote:

Darren Harris wrote:

Can anyone tell me if hard drive spindle speed is an important factor
to consider when purchasing a hard drive?
Or should I just concentrate on average latency, average access, and
max. full seek time?
I ask because two hard drives with a data rate of 80mps can differ in
these other respects.
Thanks a lot.
Darren Harris
Staten Island, New York.


For most people, desktop hard drives are hardly ever accessed anyway,
so speed is pretty irrelevant. Unless you're setting up a server that
will be accessed by many, go for the cheapest drive per byte stored.



Unless you've got bucket loads of memory, your OS is gonna be using a
swap file of some kind with reasonable regularity. Disk speed will make
a fairly large difference here. In any standard desktop system I'd go
for a 7200 rpm drive, you got a large budget and want a fast system,
get a 10k raptor.

Actually, I think a 15,000 RPM IBM disk would be good, even if it is not
as large as you would like. Take a look at the "DISK" light on your
machine. If it is on, your processor is idle and the disk is the
bottleneck.