What size is your OS/main drive?

[duragezic]

What is the deal with this Samsung Align tool? I thought it would be required for Windows XP to even use the new drive (due to some kind of new formatting of the drive) but I was just able to create partitions using Disk Management.

What's it for then? I do plan to use the drive for Windows 7 install and use, but for now I'll be using it for data storage via Windows XP.

 

[paperwastage]

I just play around with too many OS files/programs, to make it slow down/crappify(and need to reinstall)


main OS (ubuntu, W7) on 120GB each, WD black

then virtualized Ubuntu OS with 120GB on WD green, to work/play, roll back to clean image whenever i want to

 

[Joseph F]

Yeah that would probably work best, but I was wanting to use my new drive for OS/apps though due to it's speed. I was worried buying these stupid "green" 5400rpm drives that I'd lose performance compared to my 500gb 7200rpm. Yet the simple speed test tool from the Device Manager shows:

Samsung F4 2 TB 5400rpm: Sustained: 149 MB/s Burst: 186 MB/s
Samsung F1 500gb 7200rpm: Sustained: 84 MB/s Burst: 144 MB/s

Which is a huge difference. I know drives get faster... like my 500gb 7200rpm drive was a bit faster than my 250gb 7200rpm drive (and so on), but I didn't expect the 5400rpm to be that much faster.

edit: I'm leaning towards a 300 GB partition for OS/apps/games and the other ~1.5 TB for storage, with the most important ~500 GB synced to my 500gb drive as backup. My current data requires about 360 GB storage so I would be able to expand my data storage 4x and my OS/apps/games storage almost 4x.

While the sustained read/write speeds are usually higher on high-density drives, The general performance goes down due to the inferior random access times. Run a benchmark showing the random access times and you'll see that the 5400RPM drive is almost certainly inferior to the 7200RPM drive. What does this mean performance-wise? It means that since when you are loading a program or game or booting up your OS the data that needs to be loaded is usually scattered across the physical platter of the hard drive, the performance of the 5400RPM drive will in fact be lower than that of a 7200RPM drive due to the fact that a higher-RPM drive will generally access any given part of the disk faster than a lower-RPM drive.

 

[duragezic]

While the sustained read/write speeds are usually higher on high-density drives, The general performance goes down due to the inferior random access times. Run a benchmark showing the random access times and you'll see that the 5400RPM drive is almost certainly inferior to the 7200RPM drive. What does this mean performance-wise? It means that since when you are loading a program or game or booting up your OS the data that needs to be loaded is usually scattered across the physical platter of the hard drive, the performance of the 5400RPM drive will in fact be lower than that of a 7200RPM drive due to the fact that a higher-RPM drive will generally access any given part of the disk faster than a lower-RPM drive.

Good point. And I have read that. So I guess I don't need to be setting it up so that this new 5400rpm is my main/OS drive. Thanks.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I have WD 6400AAKS drives for my main OS drives. I did have them partitioned in two, basically short-stroking them, but when I installed Win7, I made them all one partition. (Well, except for that 100MB partition that Win7 creates on a fresh drive.)

 

[Makaveli]

Intel 160GB G2 SSD for OS drive.

Windows 7 x64

Haven't used a Hard drive based install since dec 2009 and plan to never go back.

 

[bulanula]

4 GB almost 5 GB. Linux > Winblow$

 

[corkyg]

PC1 - XP Pro - 160GB HDD (Reserve Drive 160GB HDD)
PC2 - Win 7 - 500GB HDD (Reserve Drive 500GB HDD; Beta Drive 160GB HDD)
Laptop 1 - Win 7 320 GB Momentus XT (Reserve Drive 320GB Momentus XT)
Laptop 2 - Win 7 320 GB Momentus XT (Reserve Drive 320GB Momentus XT)

 

[alaricljs]

500GB disk - 40GB windows 7 x64, remainder to storage.

Storage contains all games and c:\Users was moved to it as well. Most of my user data is on remote storage anyway.