I was reading a rather poor Hard Drive comparison over at Gamers Depot. I went to post my concerns and i read this on the message board.
"You know it's not often I even comment on drive reviews. It's not even an issue on desktop PCs. Especially since CPUs are much faster than a year ago. I find it VERY funny that companies like Compaq and Dell sell systems with 7200+ drives and charge more. Considering 99.9% of people won't notice the difference between the 7200 and 5400. Unless there is ALOT of I/O on the PC it doesn't matter! If you really want to see a difference you go scsi. Even then with today's CPU's and memory it doesn't make a difference if it's not a server WITH clients. Yeah apps might load a sec quicker big deal. "
I then commented saying that i actually thought hard drives had come along way (when you consider how much bigger progs are.
His response was "Let me explain...See, years(3-4+)ago most PCs didn't have enough memory for the O/S and the Apps/games. So, there was ALOT of swapping(Virtual Mem)going on when you were working/playing. Nowadays, PCs come with at least 64mb(or should) and by using FAT32 instead of FAT16 your apps/games really aren't effected by drive speed except on load. Even then it's nominal considering we are talking about 8ms vs 10-15ms. Let's think about that for a moment. We're NOT even talking about a whole(not even close) second! Oh and let's not forget about the RPM factor. Talk about the "Pepsi challege"! 4500-5400 vs 7200-10000 hmmm...
If its "cost effective" buy the fastest drive of course. But like I said before, servers and a few "power users" will even notice a difference. Hey I know everyone has to make a buck. But, honestly HDDs are the same as they were 5 years ago except MUCH bigger and slightly faster and ALOT cheaper(Paid $150 for a 850mb few years ago!). The bottom line is if you're a gamer and you need a HDD buy biggest most reliable one at the cheapest price. Don't even worry about IDE HDD benchmarks."
Man, anyone else think he is full of it?
"You know it's not often I even comment on drive reviews. It's not even an issue on desktop PCs. Especially since CPUs are much faster than a year ago. I find it VERY funny that companies like Compaq and Dell sell systems with 7200+ drives and charge more. Considering 99.9% of people won't notice the difference between the 7200 and 5400. Unless there is ALOT of I/O on the PC it doesn't matter! If you really want to see a difference you go scsi. Even then with today's CPU's and memory it doesn't make a difference if it's not a server WITH clients. Yeah apps might load a sec quicker big deal. "
I then commented saying that i actually thought hard drives had come along way (when you consider how much bigger progs are.
His response was "Let me explain...See, years(3-4+)ago most PCs didn't have enough memory for the O/S and the Apps/games. So, there was ALOT of swapping(Virtual Mem)going on when you were working/playing. Nowadays, PCs come with at least 64mb(or should) and by using FAT32 instead of FAT16 your apps/games really aren't effected by drive speed except on load. Even then it's nominal considering we are talking about 8ms vs 10-15ms. Let's think about that for a moment. We're NOT even talking about a whole(not even close) second! Oh and let's not forget about the RPM factor. Talk about the "Pepsi challege"! 4500-5400 vs 7200-10000 hmmm...
If its "cost effective" buy the fastest drive of course. But like I said before, servers and a few "power users" will even notice a difference. Hey I know everyone has to make a buck. But, honestly HDDs are the same as they were 5 years ago except MUCH bigger and slightly faster and ALOT cheaper(Paid $150 for a 850mb few years ago!). The bottom line is if you're a gamer and you need a HDD buy biggest most reliable one at the cheapest price. Don't even worry about IDE HDD benchmarks."
Man, anyone else think he is full of it?
