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Old August 18th 04, 10:27 PM
Lil' Dave
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Is this true always?
"Stephen Austin" wrote in message
newspscx5orlkjwoli1@whoosh...
On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 20:25:00 GMT, CJT wrote:

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.


There's no excuse for not having "bucket loads of memory" with memory
prices as they are today. If your system does much swapping, it's going
to be hopelessly slow no matter what drive you use.



Alright, I'll concede there, but a 7200 will still provide a very
noticable performance increase over a 5400. Not just in drive benchmarks,
but in day to day computer usage.