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Help buying a new HD, your advice apprecaited!

D

davidkay

Senior member
Right, firstly, I'm currently running a Maxtor 46.1Gb HD on my motherboard which is ATA-66 i think! I have an ISOS drive which i keep backups of my Porn and games on. When i unrar files it takes a little while to transfer to another partition.

I want to buy a new HD, but i'm not sure what to go for. I would be connecting it to the same IDE channel as my first HD. I want about 80Gb! Should i swap my old Hard drive with a new 7200RPM HD, would there be "any" performance increase over my current Maxtor 7200RPM 46Gb?

Just say i had a sepeate drive for my ISOS and wanted to unrar from one drive to the other, would it be much faster than unraring to the same drive?

What would you say the best and fastest HD for me is! So should i use the new HD as a second drive or would it be better as the main HD?

Thanks in advance for your advice
 
There would be a performance increase. First, it is going to be ata-100 which will be faster in short bursts of data. Second, it will be newer and probably work a little better. There won't be a big difference, though.
 
If you're going to get faster drive, you should use that as your main drive. The slower drive can be used for all your backups. Western Digitals are considered the fastest drives out there, so if you have the cash, you should go that route. Otherwise, Maxtors are pretty good drives, and so are Seagate drives. Hope this helps.
 
Will you see a performance increase? Basically, no. ATA 66 vs ATA 100 means about nothing since drives aren't even able to run at ATA 66. And going from a 7200 RPM drive to another 7200 RPM drive would also mean nothing. The 80Gb may have denser platters, or maybe not I don't know the drive, but even if it did the performance would be negligible.

About the only hope you have of seeing a performance increase with an IDE drive today is the Special Edition Western Digital 120Gb drive with 8MB cache (instead of the 2MB cache of other drives) Says it has a 32% increase in data access time then the drives you are looking at (seek time is the same)

Keep in mind that in real time performance we humans can only really notice performance increases of 30% or better in the real world (not benchmarks), so if this drive does what the reviews suggest it does then you should notice a slight difference if you want to shell out the $250.00-$300.00 for it.
 


<< Will you see a performance increase? Basically, no. ATA 66 vs ATA 100 means about nothing since drives aren't even able to run at ATA 66. And going from a 7200 RPM drive to another 7200 RPM drive would also mean nothing. The 80Gb may have denser platters, or maybe not I don't know the drive, but even if it did the performance would be negligible.

About the only hope you have of seeing a performance increase with an IDE drive today is the Special Edition Western Digital 120Gb drive with 8MB cache (instead of the 2MB cache of other drives) Says it has a 32% increase in data access time then the drives you are looking at (seek time is the same)

Keep in mind that in real time performance we humans can only really notice performance increases of 30% or better in the real world (not benchmarks), so if this drive does what the reviews suggest it does then you should notice a slight difference if you want to shell out the $250.00-$300.00 for it. >>


Actually, even though the drive doesn't sustain speeds that high, it has been found that the bursts can utilize more than ata-100. And I've read it to be 5% or better to be noticed, but thats just what I've read.
 
ok, thanks for the advice, One thing i am not sure on though.

Is Copying from 1 HD to the Other quicker than copying information from one partition to another on the same drive? (Both will be on the same channel, i.e. Slave and Master)

Cause i couldnt work it out. If the drive is copying to itself on another area, wouldn't it take longer as its gotta keep moving the heads between read and write? Or would it be faster than if you were copying to another HD where it had to go through the IDE channel and thus causing longer time!

Thanks!



 
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