Hardrive Performance

[Cairo777]

Hi all,

I went out and bought a 36GB Raptor (SATA) for my main comp. That was not enough in space so I also bought a Maxtor 300GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA/150 drive. Now I stupidly paid quite a ransom for that minute 36 GB Raptor thinking that it was the fastest thing out there (I could not find the bigger one) with its 10K RPM. I installed WindowsXP on that with all my apps and use the 300GB for all my backups and documents and then some games as well. What blows me away is that the 300 GB smokes my 36 in all benchmarks and is quiet and smooth. So.... my question is... does aerial density have that much of an impact on performance or does the 16Meg cache really help of is it just my imagination? Don't get me wrong, the Raptor is FAST and I should not complain as my OS goes fast, smooth as silk and all games run fast on my AMD64 X2 3800+. I have the latest Nvidia Nforce drivers installed with their IDE drivers (5.11 was the latest) with all various patches.

Thus do the latest newest largest drives actually perform better than my older 10K raptor even though they still spin at 7200 RPM? Would I thus benefit more from putting two of the 300GB newer drives in a RAID or 2 of the 36 GB Raptors?
thanks

Cairo

 

[Ichigo]

You probably just need a decent app to defrag your Raptor. The 300GB is new and doesn't have fragment problems or anything like that yet.

 

[BTRY B 529th FA BN]

Maxtor Atlas 15K is a good SCSI drive. it boasts a 3.2ms retrevial time. but then you have to buy the ULTRA 320 PCIx card and have a free pci slot, but in my opinion it felt like a 10 on the "WOW" factor

 

[Peter]

An U160 SCSI card will do too, as long as you're plugging it into a desktop grade toy mainboard, not a serious server/workstation board. This because the measly 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus will not transport more than ~100 MB/s to and fro the SCSI card anyway - so the difference between 160 and 320 MB/s on the SCSI side becomes pointless.