Hdd slightly confusing...

[MiranoPoncho]

What's better, a Sata 150 hdd with ncq or a sata2 hdd w/o? Just wondering, would there be anything that preforms on par with a raptor but costs less?
Thanks.

 

[HDTVMan]

Too many factors go into a hard drives performance. No current hard drive I know of can saturate any SATA interface.

Raptor is the fastest because of rotational speed and very low seek times.

You could go for a high density 400gig hard drive at 7200rpm with 16meg cache thats about a close as your going to get. The benefit is the bit density of the 400gig drives platters because the bits are so packed in and rotating at 7200 rpm can stream data at a very high rate. Possibly above the raptor but when it comes to seek time the raptor has it beat hands down so smaller files would easily go to the raptor. Which is most files on a hard drive.

 

[Future Shock]

NCQ only helps with workloads that accumulate a queue of requests from the harddrive - typically several applications hitting the disk all at once, like a multi-tasking workstation or a network server. In fact, for workloads that don't have this chararcteristic, NCQ actually can harm their performance. So an awful lot depends upon how you will use the drive and the types of workloads you generate.

Other than putting NCQ into the formal spec, SATA II is really just future-proofing : it offers little if any benenfit over SATA on current drives.

And lastly, the HDTVman was spot on in comparing a Raptor and a slightly slower, but more dense 7200 rpm drive. The Raptor will "feel" more responsive, but the higher throughput of the denser 7200 can bring a few good 7200s close to the Raptor in time workload (i.e., benchmark) tests and actual use. And those 7200s are MUCH cheaper in terms of $/Gigabytes than a Raptor.

Future Shock