wd hard drives

Anyone know how much performance difference there is between 2 old HD's I
picked up..
1) 20 gig Caviar WD200BB (7200rpm)
2) 40 gig Protege WD400EB (5400RPM)
mc

"mc" wrote in message
newsWLoj.34$xE.25@trnddc01...
Anyone know how much performance difference there is between 2 old HD's I
picked up..
1) 20 gig Caviar WD200BB (7200rpm)
2) 40 gig Protege WD400EB (5400RPM)
mc



Though the 7200 rpm drive will be faster...it may not be that terribly
noticable.

The last time I had a drive that was so slow the performance was terrible...
was an old 170meg drive that came on a Packard Bell 486.

On most modern systems you will not see that much difference between 5400 and
7200 rpm. The data transfer time for a track spinning at whatever RPM is a
small fraction of the number of milliseconds to seek to the track. No matter
what, the same amount of CPU time is consumed in a data transfer. Then too,
each drive has some on-board data caching mechanism, usually on a track-by-track
basis. 7200 rpm is 1/3 faster, so some part of the data transfer will be 1/3
faster... Ben Myers

On Fri, 01 Feb 2008 21:11:49 GMT, "mc" wrote:

Anyone know how much performance difference there is between 2 old HD's I
picked up..
1) 20 gig Caviar WD200BB (7200rpm)
2) 40 gig Protege WD400EB (5400RPM)
mc

I'm guessing then that it would be best to use the 7200 in the master
position, but I was told there is a way to put the 2 drives in without
either needing to be master/slave but I do not know how to do this...
The intent is to use one drive for windows and one for Linux ( for which I
know nothing)
mc

The last time I had a drive that was so slow the performance was
terrible...
was an old 170meg drive that came on a Packard Bell 486.
I've got an old compaq laptop with a 200 meg HD. Amazingly someone got
windows 95 to work on it with excel and word and there is still 50 megs
available...
mc

"mc" wrote in message
news:VyMoj.657$Ou1.548@trnddc07...


The last time I had a drive that was so slow the performance was
terrible...
was an old 170meg drive that came on a Packard Bell 486.
I've got an old compaq laptop with a 200 meg HD. Amazingly someone got
windows 95 to work on it with excel and word and there is still 50 megs
available...
mc



Win95 on a 200 meg drive is no problem at all.

Though win95 takes around 50 megs...you need a drive larger than 50 megs to
install it.

I like to experiment and get the most out of the least.

I xcopied an existing win95 installation onto a 50 meg drive...yes just 50
megs
and have a 386 with a 40 mhz AMD cpu and 16 megs of RAM...
it really runs win95 quite well. I did have to pare down the OS a bit to get
rid of unnecessary files...
then had enough room to install a small browser (Off-By-One)

I also had to set the swap file to a fixed 2 megs...to be sure the HD did
not fill up completely.
With the 16 megs of RAM...the small swap file does not seem to hurt
anything.

"mc" wrote in message
news:mwMoj.656$Ou1.381@trnddc07...
I'm guessing then that it would be best to use the 7200 in the master
position, but I was told there is a way to put the 2 drives in without
either needing to be master/slave but I do not know how to do this...
The intent is to use one drive for windows and one for Linux ( for which I
know nothing)
mc




On the same IDE cable...one drive is always master and one is always slave.
If you do not use the master/slave jumper settings...you can set each drive
to cable select.
The drive closest to the mobo will be master and the further one, slave.
I'm pretty sure that will require an 80 conductor ribbon cable.

As to Linux...I suggest doing a test install first until you get familiar
with it...

If you want to install both windows and Linux...
The best thing to do is install Windows first on the "primary" drive.
Just do your basic install...then
as your 2nd step...install Linux on your secondary drive.

If you manage to get both Windows and Linux installed OK...
then continue setting up your Windows.

The reason I suggest not fully setting up your Windows system first...is in
case you make an error
installing Linux and end up blowing away Windows


If you want to experiment first you may want to try one of the "live CD"
versions of Linux...
it will not require a harddrive installation

Damn Small Linux works very well and is just a 50 meg download!

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/