Advice Please: The Importance of Hard Drive RPMs

John R Weiss wrote:

It is true in the general case. There may be exceptions, but I can't think
of any off hand...


Many of the office type tasks here (e.g. word processing, Web browsing,
even listening to music) get done on devices that don't even HAVE local
hard drives. And the compute server to which they attach just has small
drives for booting its OS and for swap. So the disk drives the user
devices actually access are a couple of ethernet links away. Even the
file server has what you'd probably consider slow drives (but it has
lots of RAM for buffering). And it all works plenty fast -- probably a
lot faster than you're accustomed to.

Of course, if you just have one (truly "personal") computer, it'll have
a disk attached.

But I think for many people, disk drive speed is pretty low on the list
of things on which they should be spending money.

And yes, I know (for those of you reading headers) that the machine at
which I'm sitting is the exception to the setup I've described; that's
an accident of history.

"Lil' Dave" wrote...

Is this true always?


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.





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