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Simple Question Regarding Hard Drives

W

willynh

Junior Member
Hey all,

Thanks for taking a "gander" at my questions and merry christmas to you!

I'm needing some hard drive questions resolved and maybe you can help! I'm going to be buying a Nforce4 SLI board in the very forseeable future. Furthermore, I'm looking to buy the fastest single (non RAID) hard drive available. That being said, I have a couple of quesitons:

1) Is there anything planned in the forseeable future, in terms of new HD technology coming out?
2) Is the raptor still king of SATA drives? (There are SATA drives with 16MB cache out--are they faster than raptor?)
3) Are there any SATA 2.0 fully compliant HD's out there?


Many thanks for looking at the thread and have a joyful christmas! 🙂
 
You won't find any huge leaps in HD technology coming out anytime soon as far as what I can tell. The newest thing looks to be consumer drives with NCQ, which offers little benefit on the average desktop, and SATA II, which again will offer very little performance benefit except to those who are creating massive RAID arrays and need more bandwidth. I would go with the 74GB Raptor as it is the single fastest SATA hard drive available.
 
Many thanks for the reply. I suppose that raptor is the way to go... I only wish they had 16MB of cache on it, based that it can lead to a performance improvement.


Merry Christmas!
 
Originally posted by: willynh
Many thanks for the reply. I suppose that raptor is the way to go... I only wish they had 16MB of cache on it, based that it can lead to a performance improvement.


Merry Christmas!
Click to expand...

The impact of 16MB Cache v. 8MB Cache is not as great as the one between 8MB v. 2MB. I don't think you'll find a drive faster than the Raptor, unless you are looking to go SCSI.

And Mery Christmas to you as well!
 
I wouldn't say that NCQ is totally useless in a desktop environment. I've never seen any benchmarks of these the new NCQ-capable drives done with any P2P apps running (which make your PC start behaving more like a server). If you have a few Torrents running in the background making constant reads and writes to your hard drive while you're also working with other apps, I'm pretty sure you'll start to see some advantages to having NCQ to more efficently order the reads and writes.
 
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