Upgrading my system. I've have a less than one year old Dell Dimension, P4 3GHz, 1024MB RAM. I want to buy a new hard drive for it. Using it only as my boot drive, where it will have only the OS and my frequently opened applications on it. Size is irrelevant. I'm more concerned with performance. That said, the two drives I'm looking at are the WD 74GB Raptor, or the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 SATA NCQ 80GB 7200 RPM 8M Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive. The difference in price is about $120. Which got me to thinking: will I see/feel/notice any difference from one over the other?
Will I Notice any REAL WORLD Difference?
- Thread starter Carbo
- Start date
hm these few days loads of HDD questions eh?
The cloest comparison:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm...0=259&devID_1=242&devID_2=241&devCnt=3
80GB is a bit old. It's easier to compare a 160GB Segate to 74GB Raptor. In terms of transfer performance
Since the 160GB Segate has higher platter density in some test it will win over Raptor. For 80GB Raptor definitely wins all the tests
Depends on what you do really. Video editing you might see up to 10-20% performance increase if you have a good enough CPU.
Programs would load ~20% faster on the raptor if your CPU is fast enough. But these days programs only take few seconds to load. You would feel the program loading quicker, but 20% is just around miliseconds. Windows loading time would definitely be quicker though
the Segate one would have lower temperature and less noise. Raptor's noise and temperature levels are acceptable nevertheless.
If you don't defragment your HDD a lot, Raptor has an advantage is that no matter how messy your drive is, since the access time is quick, you'd not see performance degrade.
Games may load few seconds faster.
Both drives have 5 year warranty
Depend on what you use it for really. And how much $150 is worth for you.
The cloest comparison:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/benchm...0=259&devID_1=242&devID_2=241&devCnt=3
80GB is a bit old. It's easier to compare a 160GB Segate to 74GB Raptor. In terms of transfer performance
Since the 160GB Segate has higher platter density in some test it will win over Raptor. For 80GB Raptor definitely wins all the tests
Depends on what you do really. Video editing you might see up to 10-20% performance increase if you have a good enough CPU.
Programs would load ~20% faster on the raptor if your CPU is fast enough. But these days programs only take few seconds to load. You would feel the program loading quicker, but 20% is just around miliseconds. Windows loading time would definitely be quicker though
the Segate one would have lower temperature and less noise. Raptor's noise and temperature levels are acceptable nevertheless.
If you don't defragment your HDD a lot, Raptor has an advantage is that no matter how messy your drive is, since the access time is quick, you'd not see performance degrade.
Games may load few seconds faster.
Both drives have 5 year warranty
Depend on what you use it for really. And how much $150 is worth for you.
Hehe. Am I overthinking the process?
I realize 80GB is considered yesterday's news but, as I mentioned previously, this would simply be a boot drive. So, 120GB or 160GB is just unnecessary. I also have a 120GB disk for storage and backup. For me, more space than I'll ever need or use.
Let me add this is a home office PC. Used mainly for email, MS Word docs, and neffing over here. No games, no video editing. Hey, what can I say? I'm not a hard core techie.
And as far as defragging goes, I've got that on autopilot. I run Diskeeper twice a week, at night, when I am deep into my REM sleep.
I'm beginning to think that for my needs, the Seagate is the prudent choice. And that extra $120 could put a couple gallons of gas in my car...
QFT. personally i don't care if the raptor can get me into a CS server 3 seconds faster. plus the raptor is hotter and noisier. go with the seagate.
Good question. I know the mobo has two SATA ports, but I don't know about NCQ. Let me call Nehru and find out...
Just finished chatting with Praveen, over at Dell Support from somewhere on the other side. And she told me that the Dimension 4600 does support NCQ technology.
It helps a little bit you just won't see amazing results, especially if you are doing basic things like word processing and internet.
You won't see any difference.
You probably won't notice it at all. Reason being is that NCQ is designed to re-order disk transaction requests into a more efficient order. The thing is, it doesn't really do much unless you are running a lot of disk intensive, multiple simultaneous request-type work on the drive. Thus, a server is the only thing you'll actually notice a difference on, when, for example, a lot of people are querying a very large dataset or database at the same time, repeatedly.
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