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Western Digital Hard Drive

BassBomb

BassBomb

Diamond Member
I am gonna be purchasing a new hard drive within the next two weeks...

im looking at WD 250GB 16mb Cache SATA 3.0 for 120 CDN

now my uncle is like, go get a raptor... but the 74 gb raptor is 200 bucks, and i dont want to spend that kind of money on my first paychecks in life

anyways, what kind of performance gains can i expect with the new harddrive over my old? IDE vs SATA Cache sizes
 
oh yea its gonna run in sata 1.5 mode because my motherboard does not support Sata 3.0

so what kind of performance gain, load time decreasings can i expect?
 
If you really want fast boot/load times, get a couple of Hitachi 7K80 SATA II drives and run them in RAID-0. Kawabunga - cheap and fast.

.bh.
 
im sorry if im not made of money

i guess this was the wrong site to ask for applicable performance when everyone wants you to just buy some other stuff

IS ANYONE GONNA TELL ME WHAT I CAN EXPECT TO SEE with the WD?
 
Probably a good idea to check on http://www.storagereview.com - they do very good drive reviews with specific segments of testing for most types of uses. Only thing is they might not have tested your specific unit. But they did do a recent comparo of 250GB drives. I'd say the bigger cache might get you a bit better random seek time. For sequential reads (e.g. booting/loading), it's the number of bits that move past the heads in the least time that's the key. So it's areal density of the platters and rotation speed that will be the keys. But the large cache won't make a lot of diff on loading/booting. I don't even think that the areal density of the Raptors is as high as the standard drives - it's the 10k rotation speed that will be their advantage. Still those Hitachi drives I mentioned above are CHEAP ($50. US each) and a pair in RAID-0 (which your integrated SATA controller should already support - no extra cost) will beat ANY other single drive for loading/booting - even the latest 15k SCSI drives that can make a true 100MB/sec plus.

.bh.
 
Pshh.. Note to self: read the question. Skip ahead to the last line to find the answer to what you asked.It depends on what you're doing with this HDD and if you really care enough about a bit faster loading. If it's just storage, the WD is perfect. You want a lot of speed, go for RAID or get a Raptor. Raptor is louder, more expensive and likely has good performance to run 'heavy' applications on. RAID, two drives work together, you only get the space of one drive (i.e. 2x 250Gb in RAID = 250Gb).

So it all boils down to this: do you even give a *hit about the 'extra' speed? It'll cost you double/triple. Also, unless you run RAID or a Raptor, I doubt an SATA 3.0 will matter since most HDDs (even SATA) don't even break the ATA-133 speed limit. You might see a small differemce though. When I went from SATA BACK to IDE, the SATA ran at UDMA6 while the IDE is UDMA5, but that's assuming the drives can even go that fast.
 
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