Q about harddrive speeds and OS

[NoidBlarg]

Hi, I'm new to the forum, nice to meet everyone here,

I've been thinking about getting a faster harddrive, but will it make any difference?
I have a p4 2.4 gig that is used as a DAW...1 gig ram, external m -audio firewire 410 soundcard and so on. Currently I have 2 harddrives; a 40 gig ide 5,400rpm with win xp installed and a 120 gig sata 7,200rpm with all my audio and processing programs installed, as well as the virtual memory.

Will my computer, and more importantly the audio programs, run any faster if I install win xp on a faster 10k or 15k rpm harddrive? If it will only boot faster, it wouldn't matter...I guess I am unclear on what the harddrive's role is in detail concerning the OS.

If anyone can clear this up for me, I would greatly appreciate it...just a quick explanation or a link or something.

Thanks!
Richie

 

[birdpup]

Yes, the harddrive is a significant factor in system speed.
1) With just the two hard drives you possess, your system would run faster if you were to place the operating system on the faster 7200rpm drive rather than the 5400rpm drive as it is now.
2) Native Command Queuing allows the hard drive to intelligently rearrange the execution order of the incoming read/write commands based on the read/write head's current position. This allows for quicker response and decreased latency.
3) The Western Digital Raptor at 10,000rpm is generally seen as being to expensive for the minimal speed increase (quicker response and decreased latency) it provides.
4) A hard drive with a Serial ATA (SATA) interface is faster than a hard drive with an IDE interface. I am sure there are reviews showing the speed difference between the two. Some people say it does not matter much which one is used.
5) Maxtor has some higher capacity hard drives with 16MB buffers. The buffer size significantly affects the hard drive's latency. Buffer sizes currently available are 2MB, 4MB (?), 8MB, and now 16MB.

Your 5400rpm hard drive probably possesses a 2MB buffer and your 7200rpm hard drive could possess a 2MB or an 8MB buffer. This would be a second advantage to switching your operating system to the 7200rpm hard drive, in addition to the rotational speed increase gained from 5400 to 7200 rpm's.

I recommend purchasing a new large capacity hard drive of 160, 200, or 250GB's with an 8MB buffer from Seagate or a 16MB buffer from Maxtor, installing WinXP on a 25GB partition on this new hard drive, and using the older 5400rpm 40GB hard drive as storage for P2P (Emule) if you have an internet connection faster than 56K dial-up.