a harddrive that is faster than Hitachi Sata series

[faye]

Hi,

I am looking for a harddrive, which doesn't have to be really big in volume...
I am going to put Winxp pro, applications, and games so i believe a 36GB or less will be fine for me..

I am now using a Hitachi 80GB 8mb sata drive, so whcih one should i go for...

i mean those 10k rpm drives.. UltraSCSI is too expensive for me and i don't have a scsi card..
I have a Asus P4P800E-Deluxe motherboard, so which drives can gimme a really decent speed?

Price no greater than $110.( or a tiny little bit above)

thanks

 

[SilverBack]

Western Digital Raptor 36.7GB 10,000RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model WD360GD $108.49

Specifications:
Capacity: 36.7GB
Average Seek Time: 5.2 ms
Buffer: 8MB
Rotational Speed: 10000 RPM
Interface: Serial ATA

 

[faye]

actually i have those information too.. however i don't know how fast it actually comparing to my Hitachi 8MB sata drive.

I mean how much faster..

 

[ch33zw1z]

check the specs: the seek time is prolly a few ms lower because of the difference in rpm's. you will most likely notice a difference.

 

[JeffreyLebowski]

Seriously, is .5 or so milliseconds for far less capacity that important? I guess i'm just a fan of drive space over drive speed.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: JeffreyLebowski
Seriously, is .5 or so milliseconds for far less capacity that important? I guess i'm just a fan of drive space over drive speed.

regular 7200RPM drive: ~8.5-9ms seek time.
"Raptor" 10KRPM drive: 4.5 ms seek time.
15KRPM SCSI drive: ~3.3ms seek time.

The seek time is basically cut in half going 7200->10000 RPM. For most desktop operations, *far* more time is spent seeking than transferring data (since even a 7200RPM drive transfers at 30-40MB/sec. easily, and can burst higher). A higher-speed drive can greatly improve loading times and the speed of operations on small files.

That said, you're generally better off with more RAM before upgrading your hard drive; no matter how fast a disk is, it's very slow compared to RAM -- so if you're running out and being forced to use your swapfile, nothing is going to be fast.