Hard drive decisions.

[nocrapman]

I am deciding what kind of HD i want as a primary boot drive(non-RAID). I would love to go with a 10,000 rpm Raptor... but its not very cost effective for me as of now. So I am stuck with 7200 rpms. Of these, most ppl seem to go with a WD Caviars - they are pretty cheap and good. If the seek times and latencies are the same - should I go for a big HD like a 250 or 300 gigs... or stay smaller in the 80 to 160 gig range? I dont have a special need for enormous disk space. Most of my stuff fits on a 40 gigs HD. But it wouldn't hurt to have some extra space since cost increments are not that big. Any ideas or suggestions?

 

[Bobthelost]

Bigger = faster. If everything else is equal you'll get more performance from a larger HD.

 

[nocrapman]

Why would bigger=faster? Something I am missing?

 

[Centoros]

I use Seagate drives as they are quite zippy. Get one with a bigger cache such 8X or 16X cache. This will help performance.

As far as size goes, what I do is look at current pricing. Get the most bang for your buck as usually it's cheaper to buy a larger drive while paying less money per gig.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: nocrapman
Why would bigger=faster? Something I am missing?

Obviously, otherwise you'd know and wouldn't have to ask 😉

Think about it like this, smaller HDs have one platter, while larger ones have 2+ (I think the largest have 4 or 5). Each platter has a read head, these work in paralell so that you can read/write data from/to two platters at the same time. This increases your data transfer rates.

There's a much better and more correct explanation at storage review if you want to take the time to check it out. But if you head over to the performance database you can see that for whatever reason it is bigger HDs do perform better than smaller ones (from the same family).

http://www.storagereview.com/guide2000/ref/hdd/perf/perf/int/mechSurfaces.html

Seasonic drives are firmly middle of the field for performance, but they do come with top notch warranties, if you want speed then the WD caviar range or Hitachi Deskstar are the best performing 7200 drives.