Does the RPM of your Hard Drive have much effect on SETI WU Times?

[Smoke]

Does the RPM of your Hard Drive have much effect on SETI WU Times? Trying to put some crackers together for SETI and need some hard drives. The cheapest new ones seem to be the 20G 5400 RPM models. Would there be much to gain by purchasing the 7200 RPM versions?

 

[minendo]

I would say that it doesnt make a difference (and if it does its a really small difference) because I am getting the same times as I used to. I originally had a 30gb 7200RPM WD drive and have since moved to a 60gb 5400RPM WD drive.

 

[micron]

I'm not 100% sure, but I don't think hard drive RPM would have much of a benefit to SETI. I always spend a few extra $$ and get 7,200 though .

 

[BigFatCow]

i highly doubt it, i know some people do it from Floppies which are alot slower than a 5400RPM HD..

 

[Hellburner]

Not unless you're running it out of virtual memory.

If you're building systems dedicated to seti only, you only need a large enough HD for an operating system and a seti install. I actually had a stripped win98 install I got in under 100 megs, it was actually a functional system and all the programs were installed on a mapped drive over a 100bt network. These days you can pick up ~500 meg HD's for $15 + S&H, these coupled with an all in one board gives you a fully functional system on the cheap.

 

[paf077]

the CLi doesn't access the hard enough to make a difference! If you're going to transfer DV through Firewire port or USB2.0, THEN you'll see a big speed diff!

 

[htmlmasterdave]

No

 

[networkman]

I don't think the RPMs would matter much to SETI, but my computers all tell me that they'd much prefer drives with faster RPMs than what they have; :Q even the machines with 10k drives tell me they'd like 15k drives instead.

 

[ShotgunSi]

I would say no as well.
I played around with a Ram Disk program that essentially turns your extra System Ram into an ultra fast hard drive.
WU time were MAYBE 5 min faster, if that. So I don't think you will notice the diff between 5400 vs. 7200 for JUST seti.
Your OS boot time will like the 7200 drive though

 

[Assimilator1]

You would hardly see any difference Smokie ,go for the 5400 models & save yourself some $$

Btw in days past I used to have a PII 233 @ 280(2.5xCAS2 112) running SETI CLi v2.4 ,with an old 540 Mb Hdd (unknown RPM) I used to get WU times of about 10.5 hrs!! (seems incredible fast now for its MHz,actually it was very good for its time) when I switched that HDD for a 20 Gb 5400 RPM drive I noticed no difference in WU times.Remember higher density HDD's will give you a greater data througput too

 

[cakin]

Under Power Option Properties I would set the hard drive to NEVER spin down.

 

[Maggotry]

I have a 7200 ATA100 in Maggotry and a 5400 ATA66 in Grendel. Maggotry cracks a wu slightly faster than Grendel, but Maggotry is 100MHz faster on clock speed and 66MHz faster on FSB. So I'd say with 99% confidence that HD speed is irrelevant.

 

[Logix]

I can tell you from back in my Win95/98 days that booting up the computer was definitely faster with a 7200rpm hard drive than with a 5400rpm. Nowadays, processors are faster anyway and with Win2K/XP, who needs to reboot anymore?

 

[CraigRT]

NO difference. chipset, CPU(speed), system memory,(size, speed) matter the most.. the rest is negligable. (hard drive speed)