New IDE 7200 HDD- What is the best?

[jh0sken612]

Noise is not really a problem, so I guess the Barracuda IV is out, its seek times aren't just up to par?

I was thinking IBM 120GXP Series? I am looking for a 60 - 100GB drive, at a good price.


Also- where does everyone buy Hard drives from? I live in IL, so let me know thx

Later/Jim

 

[kuk]

THE best, would be the SE series from WD, with 8MB cache.
Second choice would be the 120GXP series ... xbitlabs reviewed it, and came up really strong. Still, I don't trust IBM with my data after my 75GXP failed last month. :|

 

[Mem]

One of the best is the Maxtor D740X HD it come`s in 20,40,60,80Gb models,it`s fast and quiet plus you also get Maxtor`s great customer support so it`s very good value IMHO.

 

[KenAF]

What's the fastest ATA drive for the desktop? Most here know the answer already, but for those that don't, here's the answer.

What's the quietest 7200rpm ATA drive for the desktop? Here's the answer..

 

[Dug]

KenAF-
The only problem with the storagereview link is that they don't have the 120gxp in there.
Yes the WD still will be a bit faster, but not worth the price tag. Might as well get scsi, unless you need the space.

Look at the link Kuk gave to xbitlabs.

BTW- the perception of hard hard drive speed for the regular user comes from seek times more than anything else.

As far as where to get a hard drive- hypermicro. Their customer service is unmatched.

 

[jh0sken612]

So what I am getting from this is:

Western Digital is the FASTEST, but the price is outrageous.

120GXP would be my best bet?

 

[jh0sken612]

MWAVE has the 8MB buffer WD 120GB 7200 (1200JB) Drive... 8mb buffer for 259$
The 2MB version (1200BB), is 209$

Would the 8MB buffer make a 50$ differnce ??
Right now I plan on putting it in my slower, older machine- but It will go in my new PC when I get it done.

 

[JellyBaby]

<< 120GXP would be my best bet? >>

If IBM fixed their reliability problems and if you can find 120GXPs for less than WD JBs then go for it.

 

[KenAF]

<< Would the 8MB buffer make a 50$ differnce ??
Right now I plan on putting it in my slower, older machine- but It will go in my new PC when I get it done. >>

Yes, the 8Mb buffer would be worth a $200 difference...the standard WD1200BB with 2Mb cache isn't anywhere near as fast as the WD1200JB with 8Mb cache. Take a look right here to see for yourself.

Actually, the WD1200JB isn't really that expensive...it's just that it's only sold in a large 120Gb size. The IBM 120GXP in the 120Gb size is even more expensive ($270?). For those that want to see how the IBM 120GXP compares to the WD1200JB in performance, look at this page.

 

[billyjak]

Just bought a Caviar WD1200JB Western digital Friday, hope to have it tomorrow.
It is no doubt the fastest and quietest hard IDE on the market right now.
Can't wait to test this baby out

 

[jh0sken612]

I dont really need a 120GB hard drive but maybe I will in a year or so

1200JB sounds like the best deal for me

 

[jm0ris0n]

I'm very pleased with the Maxtor D740X series. Fast, quiet, reliable.

On a personal note I fear Western Digital hardrives more than I do the plague.

 

[KenAF]

<< t is no doubt the fastest and quietest hard IDE on the market right now. >>



It may be the fastest, but the WD sure isn't the quietest. That honor falls to the Seagate Barracuda IV.

 

[jh0sken612]

$242 for the WD 1200JB @ Datadrive4all.com

Sounds like a plan for MY tax returns

 

[John]

Yes, the 8Mb buffer would be worth a $200 difference...

LoL, not really....unless you like blowing money on benchmarks. The difference between the 120GXP and the 1200JB is not going to be seen in typical apps IMHO. I think even Pariah will agree with that.

 

[KenAF]

John,

I agree you probably won't see a helluva lot of difference between the 120GXP and 1200JB for most tasks...both of these drives are in a league of it own, or so it seems. At identical 120Gb sizes, the 1200JB is cheaper than the 120GXP; it's rather unfortunate that WD does not offer the drive in smaller sizes.

That said, benchmarks on Storagereview are "playbacks" of the access and data patterns recorded for real world tasks. It's actually pretty cool....read about it here. A few descriptions follow below...



<< As mentioned before, IPEAK SPT's RankDisk presents a formidable opportunity to compare hard drives utilizing contemporary, "real-world" patterns. By using WinTrace32 to capture "representative" workloads from a variety of applications, actual drive usage may be exactingly played back through RankDisk on a variety of disks to deliver the ultimate comparison of single-user drive performance. Since the CPU, RAM, operating system, OS cache, and application data requests impact only WinTrace32's recording segment and since only controller drivers, host adapters, and the hard disk itself affect RankDisk's playback, the WinTrace32-RankDisk combo avoids WB99's pitfalls...

StorageReview.com Office DriveMark 2002 - this figure represents a score drawn from playback of a trace file that captured 30 minutes of typical PC use by yours truly. My average, every day use consists of various office and internet applications. These programs include: Outlook XP, Word XP, Excel XP, PowerPoint XP, Calypso (a freeware e-mail client), SecureCRT v3.3 (a telnet/SSH client), CuteFTP Pro v1.0 (an FTP/SSH client), ICQ 2000b (an instant messenger), Palm Hotsync 4.0 (a utility to update my PDA with info on my PC), Gravity 2.3 (a usenet/newsgroups client), PaintShop Pro v7.0 (an entry-level image editor), Media Player v8 for the occasional MP3, and last but certainly not least, Internet Explorer 6.0. These applications were task-switched/multitasked (take your pick between these terms? the distinction has blurred over the last several years) in a typical fashion that mirrors my activity and, we suspect, the activity of many users around the world.

Let's take a closer look at some of the characteristics of everyday productivity usage when serviced by the recording drive, a Maxtor DiamondMax D740X:

[images cut out]

The upper-left graphic represents the transfer sizes found in the SR Office DriveMark 2002. It illustrates that productivity use is highly characterized by small-block accesses, with 4k transfer sizes dominating the chart. Equally interesting information may be found in the upper-right graphic, a distribution of queue depths as a function of % during active drive time. In a finding that may surprise some folks, a drive's queue depths remain relatively low even when a drive is quite busy. This finding, in fact, has resulted in some key changes in our IOMeter methodology, discussed later in this article. The lower two images are related. The first is a chart that reveals seek distance as a % of total accesses. Note that while nearly 20% of accesses took the actuator more than sixteen-million sectors (in other words, 8 GB) away from its current location, approximately half of all accesses occurred within sixteen-thousand sectors (8 MB) of the previous one? a small distance indeed given today's areal densities. Further note that 16% of these accesses were serviced as "0" sectors away? in other words, in this representation of typical office/productivity work that features a high percentage of small-block accesses, 16% of requests were sequential in nature. The final chart, representing the percentage of data transferred vs. seek distance, extends on this a bit. Over 25% of requested data was sequential.

StorageReview.com Bootup DriveMark 2002 - Since we founded SR, we've been constantly bombarded with e-mails requesting timings of an OS's boot procedure, an allegedly "real-world" measure. Personally, we believe that timing a system's startup just indicates, well, how fast a machine (and, to a lesser extent, a drive) is at bootup. Even so, Windows XP's boot procedure involves significantly different access patterns and queue depths than found in other procedures. As a result, just for fun, we decided to utilize WinTrace32's special "startup capture" option to trace my personal machine's boot pattern. In this procedure, WinTrace32 places a driver at the earliest possible point within the startup procedure. The disk accesses that follow the driver's load (i.e., virtually the whole startup process) are then logged to a buffer and written out upon the user's request. The SR Bootup DriveMark 2002 is a capture of my personal machine's startup into Windows XP after having been used for many days and having been defragmented several times in the period. This trace also includes the initialization and loading of the following memory-resident utilities: Dimension4 (a time synchronizer), Norton Antivirus 2002 AutoProtect, Palm Hotsync v4.0, and ICQ 2000b.

[graphics cut out]

Despite the startup optimizations that Windows XP performs, transfer sizes remain predominately small-block in nature. What's interesting here are the marked increases in queue depth. While it's still a far cry from, say, 256 I/Os, the Bootup trace's average of 2.69 doubles those of the Office and High-End patterns. According to the seek distance graphs, buffer hits come in a bit lower than in other patterns, with long-stroke seeks comprising a large percentage of both the number of seeks as well as the amount of data transferred.

StorageReview.com Gaming DriveMark 2002 - A significant number of readers enjoy applications that don't fall into any of the categories above: Games! In earlier days we enjoyed sinking hours into the latest strategy game or RPG. These days, however, SR is more than a full time job? our days of avid gaming are sadly over. WinTrace32-RankDisk nonetheless offers an opportunity to examine drive performance in this neglected sector. Unlike the other DriveMarks presented above, the SR Gaming DriveMark 2002 is a normalized average of five different traces rather than the results of a single trace. We played through the following games for approximately half an hour each to obtain five distinct traces: Lionhead's Black & White v1.1, Valve's Half-Life: Counterstrike v1.3, Blizzard's Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction v1.09b, Maxis' The Sims: House Party v1.0, and Epic's Unreal Tournament v4.36... >>