What's the fastest single hard drive on the market?

nx02nx02

Senior member
Dec 26, 2001
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Hi there. I have a question.

I just built a new computer but I am still using my old 80 Gig Western Digital 8MB cache for now.

In the next couple of weeks im looking to buy a new hard drive for my computer.

My question is which should I buy? I want the fastest I can get without going to raid and it would be nice to get atleast a 300 GB- 500 GB Hard drive.

The 80 GIG is ok but it is really bottlenecking my computer.
There is nothing wrong with it it just is kind of old technology and I feel like it is by far the slowest thing in my computer.

I have a few questions.

1. What is the best single hard drive on the market for gaming? (atleast 300 - 500 GIGS)

2. How much faster are the new drives compared to my 80 GIG Western Digital?

3. When is new Hard Drive technology going to come out that will significantly improve performance?


Thanks for reading. :):)
 

Sunner

Elite Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Fastest without going somewhat exotic(as in SCSI) would be a Raptor.

Fastest in the range you're talking about...check out Storagereview.
As far as I can remember, it's fairly even between WD/Maxtor/Hitachi, trading wins depending on what you test.
Seagate(which owns Maxtor btw) tends to be slower, but I always go with Seagate since they've been good to me, and come with a 5 year warranty across their entire line.
In reality, I doubt you'll notice much, if any, difference between either brand unless you start running benchmarks.

And new technology, the only thing that looks like it'll show up soonish is hybrid drives with some flash based cache on them, doubt if you'll see any "WOW!!!" kind of improvements though, more like yet another performance bump in the never ending evolution of computer components.
 

DrMrLordX

Lifer
Apr 27, 2000
22,027
11,606
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I'm going to assume that you're referring to standard SATA drives and not SCSI or anything like that.

The fastest harddrive out there is the 74 gig Raptor by Western Digital (16meg cache version). Second fastest is the 150 meg Raptor, and third fastest is the older 8meg cache 74 gig Raptor.

Technically the Gigabyte iRam is faster than all of the above, but it's nothing more than 4 sticks of DDR SDRAM crammed into a solid state device. Interesting, but low on capacity.

If you're looking for something fast in the 300-500 gig range, I'd go with the Hitachi Deskstar 7k500:

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200511/HDS725050KLA360_3.html

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200511/HDS725050KLA360_4.html

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200611/ST3750640NS_3.html

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200611/ST3750640NS_4.html
 

AstroGuardian

Senior member
May 8, 2006
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I agree. Go for the Hitachi DeskStar for capacity and performance.

I use the same drive but with different setup.
I have Hitachi DeskStar 7K500 for data storage and 2 x Western Digital 160Gb JS (SATA-2 with 8mb cace each) in a stripe array getting 320Gb from them and some extremely good performance for gaming. Levels just load lightning fast.
 

Blain

Lifer
Oct 9, 1999
23,643
3
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Originally posted by: DrMrLordX
I'm going to assume that you're referring to standard SATA drives and not SCSI or anything like that.

The fastest harddrive out there is the 74 gig Raptor by Western Digital (16meg cache version). Second fastest is the 150 meg Raptor, and third fastest is the older 8meg cache 74 gig Raptor.
;)

 

nx02nx02

Senior member
Dec 26, 2001
539
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How much faster is the Raptor or the Hitachi compared to my current 80 GIG Western Digital SE 8MB Cache?

Will I see a huge increase in performance?


Like will it be atleast twice as fast?
 

Fraggable

Platinum Member
Jul 20, 2005
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Originally posted by: coolpurplefan
would raid 0 increase the performance?

Yes. The performance increase is somewhat similar to the increase you see using SLI in gaming; 30-75% increase or so depending on the drives and program you're using.

Originally posted by: nx02nx02
How much faster is the Raptor or the Hitachi compared to my current 80 GIG Western Digital SE 8MB Cache?

Will I see a huge increase in performance?


Like will it be atleast twice as fast?

Difference between an old 80GB IDE drive and a 74-150GB SATA Raptor will be night and day. I would say a 74GB Raptor will be at least a 50% increase. I've heard that RAID 0'ing Raptors doesn't yield much of an increase in speed.