Projecting the Performance Hit from an ATA-33 HD

[scott123]

I'm putting together a system for a financially challenged friend, and, so far, the only drive I've been able to get my hands on is an old Quantum Bigfoot 12.9 gb ATA-33 hard drive.

I'm pairing this drive with fairly respectable new components:

GIGABYTE GA-MA69VM-S2 AM2 (open box)
AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Brisbane 2.3GHz 2 x 512KB L2
Micron 1 gb ddr2 667

He's never used a computer in his life, so, at most, I expect him to do light browsing, emails and maybe word processing.

What issues might he be running into with a ATA-33 drive? I'm guessing it'll take forever to boot, right? Anything he saves is going to take a while as are file transfers.

What about browsing? I don't expect him to be signing up for FiOS, that's for sure. If he does sign up to a fast internet provider, though, is that drive going to kill his online experience? This may be a really dumb question, but when you download web pages, they load in memory first and then cache on the HD, correct? If you turn caching off, the speed of the HD has no bearing. Or does it?

 

[Ratman6161]

Sorry to say it but thats about the worst drive you could choose. I have an old system I'm running with XP SP2 on a 6.5 GB 7200 RPM ATA33 drive and its VERY noticeably slower than a more modern hard drive. And the Bigfoot drives were considered particularly slow even when they were new. If my memory is correct I think they were only running at 4200 RPM or something. They were sold as a way to get large (for that day) capacity at a low price - usually used as a second drive to store data while your OS ran on something faster.

 

[scott123]

Ratman6161, is that ATA33 slower with everything you do? Do web pages take forever to load?

I went with the Bigfoot because it seemed like a quality drive, but I have other alternatives. Thanks to my penchant for grabbing PCs from the side of the street on garbage day, I have a pretty large of collection of vintage (okay, old) drives. Everything's ATA33, but I might have a 7200 one, if that makes a difference.

 

[Lithan2]

Yeah they're slow, but well.. his load times will suck... for a rig where ya cant spare $40 for a modern hard drive, you'll have to make some compromises.