Advice Please: The Importance of Hard Drive RPMs

Shailesh Humbad wrote:


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.



Nonsense, everything the system is running is loaded from HDD,
and the speed is directly effected by speed of that hard drive.
A Celeron 800 with a WD Raptor HDD will feel faster for everday
use than a P4 3.2GHz with a budget-grade 40GB HDD.

Nothing wrong with choosing cheapest GB/$ for mass storage, but
it cripples a system to use such drives as primary app or OS
drive.


I second that. Think about how much disk access Windows XP does just to
log you off the computer and save settings. Some people's profiles are
many megabytes, and Windows is just slow, so having a fast HDD makes
things much smoother. I don't think I could live without my 2x Raid-0
10K Raptors. I would get a laptop, but I can't stand their measly
4200rpm drives (on some). Maybe next I'll get a pair of 15k scsi drives...

How many times a day do you log on and off, and how many seconds does
that represent?

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CJT wrote:
kony wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:29:03 GMT, CJT
wrote:



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.


I think the devil will be in the details. If you mostly just browse the
Web, I doubt your disk will be exercised much. If you do a lot of video
editing, you probably want something pretty fast -- most likely RAID.
There's a whole range in between (and perhaps beyond).



Clueless.

Browser caches everything to disk, and reloads it all from this
cache until pages are refreshed unless brower is changed from
defaults.

The only time HDD speed doesn't matter much is when system has A)
Excess system memory to cache files B) Limited multitasking so
files are never flushed from this cache.


I stand by what I said. Watch your disk light some time. If it's
on a lot, then the disk speed might make a difference. If it hardly
ever flashes, then your drive's speed doesn't matter one bit.


Most folk's applications have a heck of a time getting from the hard drive
to RAM without flashing the LED.

the difference between a 5400 and a 7200 is noticable even on a desktop

"CJT" wrote in message
...
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.

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The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
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David Maynard wrote:

CJT wrote:

kony wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:29:03 GMT, CJT
wrote:



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.



I think the devil will be in the details. If you mostly just browse
the
Web, I doubt your disk will be exercised much. If you do a lot of
video
editing, you probably want something pretty fast -- most likely RAID.
There's a whole range in between (and perhaps beyond).




Clueless.

Browser caches everything to disk, and reloads it all from this
cache until pages are refreshed unless brower is changed from
defaults.

The only time HDD speed doesn't matter much is when system has A)
Excess system memory to cache files B) Limited multitasking so
files are never flushed from this cache.



I stand by what I said. Watch your disk light some time. If it's
on a lot, then the disk speed might make a difference. If it hardly
ever flashes, then your drive's speed doesn't matter one bit.


Most folk's applications have a heck of a time getting from the hard
drive to RAM without flashing the LED.


No disagreement here, but for most folks that's a minuscule fraction of
the time they spend sitting in front of the computer.

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Monster wrote:

the difference between a 5400 and a 7200 is noticable even on a desktop

Yeah -- they tend to generate more heat.


"CJT" wrote in message
...

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.

--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .





--
The e-mail address in our reply-to line is reversed in an attempt to
minimize spam. Our true address is of the form .

CJT wrote:

David Maynard wrote:

CJT wrote:

kony wrote:

On Wed, 18 Aug 2004 21:29:03 GMT, CJT
wrote:



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.




I think the devil will be in the details. If you mostly just
browse the
Web, I doubt your disk will be exercised much. If you do a lot of
video
editing, you probably want something pretty fast -- most likely RAID.
There's a whole range in between (and perhaps beyond).





Clueless.

Browser caches everything to disk, and reloads it all from this
cache until pages are refreshed unless brower is changed from
defaults.

The only time HDD speed doesn't matter much is when system has A)
Excess system memory to cache files B) Limited multitasking so
files are never flushed from this cache.




I stand by what I said. Watch your disk light some time. If it's
on a lot, then the disk speed might make a difference. If it hardly
ever flashes, then your drive's speed doesn't matter one bit.


Most folk's applications have a heck of a time getting from the hard
drive to RAM without flashing the LED.


No disagreement here, but for most folks that's a minuscule fraction of
the time they spend sitting in front of the computer.


Well, we could quibble over what 'minuscule' means in this context but the
reality of it is that most home users don't load up Word and then leave it
there all day while they, however frequently or infrequently, pound out
documents; they, e.g. families, are often a competing set of users with
applications going up and down rather often and even a 'single' gamer
doesn't necessarily load up just one game for the day. And it really
doesn't matter if 'mathematically' the disk usage is a 'small percentage'
of the total time because what a user 'feels' and gauges things by is how
long it takes between 'click-click' and whatever they expect to happen from it.

And that's before we even get to doing a couple of things simultaneously
and/or burning CD/DVDs, playing videos/MP3s, etc.

I have yet to see a user who didn't notice the difference between a 15 gig
5400 RPM drive and a 120 gig 7200 RPM drive. The later is simply faster.

Makes little difference unless


Your a benchmark watcher

your transferring huge files between partitions..and maybe drives on a
regular basis, but there are other factors that effect data speed
between 2 physical drives other than HD RPM speed

Your using something other than OB IDE...SCSI drives (and sata, I
think- just started looking at moving to this format and can't give
you an opinion yet) would benefit or if your running a separate IDE
controller

If your running a file server....even this is not necessary.....lots
of memory can make up easily for HD rpm. I would look for reliability,
warranty length, and if you want, the buffer size ( I don't see/feel
that its any faster 4 or 8)along with a good sale price

all my opinion, works for me sale gimmicks are every where


"Darren Harris" wrote in message
om...
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.

CJT wrote:
snip

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.

I think the devil will be in the details. If you mostly just browse the
Web, I doubt your disk will be exercised much.


No, but the devil will be exorcised.


Odie

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 04:48:06 GMT, CJT
wrote:


You must be on crack. It is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH MUCH slower that
anyone with semi-modern gear is accustomed to. Even GbE on a PC
is slower than budget local storage HDD. Server-side apps are a
logistic solution, performance be damned.


You're just pulling things out of your *ss. I'm telling you about
actual experience.


Oops, I guess I forgot that I've never used a computer before,
LOL.




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.



That's why some people buy newer computer then soon feel it isn't
much faster, because they didn't significantly improve the
bottleneck to their use, which is often the HDD.

Not in my experience for typical office tasks in a properly
configured system.

There is no such thing as "properly configured" that will change
the fact that data I/O is significantly slower over a LAN,
compared to any modern HDD. No grand theory changes that, all
you have is additional overhead in the already-slowest part of a
system, at least for these light tasks.

On Thu, 19 Aug 2004 04:45:55 GMT, CJT
wrote:


Nonsense, everything the system is running is loaded from HDD,
and the speed is directly effected by speed of that hard drive.
A Celeron 800 with a WD Raptor HDD will feel faster for everday
use than a P4 3.2GHz with a budget-grade 40GB HDD.

Nothing wrong with choosing cheapest GB/$ for mass storage, but
it cripples a system to use such drives as primary app or OS
drive.

I disagree. If you spend all day browsing and word processing, you
load your browser and word processor once in the morning, and once
they're open then opening them isn't any longer an issue (unless
your machine crashes a lot -- but that's not usually the disk's fault).

I suppose you're just a troll, since I already told you that the
browser caches all those files to the HDD when "browsing".

No matter how much you disagree, time and time again people
everywhere notice the difference between an old/slow HDD and
something modern/fast, not to mention benchmarks. A lot of
memory will reduce need for HDD access, but the two are
complimentary storage, not one a replacement for the other.