Considering hard drive upgrade

[archcommus]

I currently have a Seagate ST3120026A 7200.7 series IDE ATA100 120 GB HDD. The space/speed has been fine for me for awhile. Recently, I'm getting a bit low on space and am sometimes dissatisfied with the ridiculous amounts of time it takes to extract RARs and to install modern (4+ GB) games.

I've been considering this drive from Newegg, the Seagate ST3320620AS 7200.10 series SATA 3 Gb/s 320 GB drive. Obviously whether I really need the space or not is something I have to decide myself, but would the speed increases alone justify the purchase? I don't want to see benches, I'm interested in how much real-world time I will gain doing things like extracting multi-GB RAR files and installing games.

Or, if I waited to do this upgrade until I REALLY needed the space, say when I got Vista, would I be able to get a significantly faster drive for the same price at that time?

And finallly, since it's SATA would I need a new PSU? I currently have an Antec SL400 with all molex connectors.

Thanks.

 

[GrammatonJP]

That drive have been on sale.. theres a thread in hot deal, im sure someone tested the speed.. i have the 750g one, works pretty good

http://pics.bbzzdd.com/users/GrammatonJP/750GB.jpg HD tach 750 vs 250 maxtor maxline sata

You would not need a new psu, but you can get the molex sata converter.. my 750 did not have a regular molex and im' pretty sure it might not be on the 320 also.. when is vista coming out ? next year ? by next year, the 750 is probably going to be around 200-300.. its around 350 now.. hd price drops fast.

 

[Spikesoldier]

sure, the new hard drives are nice. i remembered a big difference when 8mb cache drives came out vs the 2mb's, im sure you will notice quite a difference updating from the .7 to the .10.


also make sure that your SATA ports are not blocked by something like your video card. when i upgraded to a physically larger card (6800GT) the heatsink blocked the SATA ports on my motherboard. why they would design it like that..only epox knows.

but thats something to check for, i remember always wanting to get a raptor, and maybe a .10, but i caught myself and instead ordered a 400gb PATA one.

 

[archcommus]

Thanks, guys, bump for more opinions!

 

[Carl Uman]

Get a WD Raptor for your OS and games and put your media files on your old drive

 

[Noubourne]

I've got the 320 and it's a good drive. Quiet, and quick. Noticeably faster than my DiamondMax 9 (SATA I) on moving files. 7200.10s are very near the top of the line performance from the reviews I've seen. Pretty much #1 for drives that cost less than $1.00 per gig.

Some sites benches actually include decent size file transfers (real world benchmarks). I think Anand does 300 1MB files, and 1 300MB file and some zip/unzip tests too... so not all benches are useless. I think what you meant to say was that you don't care about SYNTHETIC benchmarks, which is understandable. Real-world benchmarks have and always will show you exactly what kind of improvement you would see, so don't go hating on benchmarks altogether. Even synthetic benches aren't useless, they give a decent insight into the particular strengths and weaknesses of a piece of hardware. You just can't take a synthetic bench and extrapolate real-world performance, that's all.

There is generally an anti-scientific attitude in the US though, so I'm not surprised to hear someone hating on benchmarking in general. Incompetent luddite leaders will always be asking us to get touchy-feely with things, in order to keep us from seeing the facts.