Hard drive speed vs capacity

**Maveric** · 02-16-2002, 12:24 PM

I have been in the market for a new hard drive for my home computer and have been looking at 80GB and 60GB hard drives. My question is what do you think would be better a larger capacity HD or a higher speed one? I can get a 60GB 7200 RPM for about $100 or a 80 GB 5400 RPM for the same price.

**graviss** · 02-16-2002, 12:55 PM

If this is your main hd then go for the 7200 one. It'll be a little faster executing programs.
If this is second (or third, etc) and just used for storage the go for the big 80gig.

**CaffeineAddict** · 02-16-2002, 01:14 PM

If this is your main hd then go for the 7200 one. It'll be a little faster executing programs.

I'll second that... I believe you'll enjoy the speed more. And unless you install a ton of stuff or download like a mad man... I don't believe you'll find it filling up too quickly.

If this is second (or third, etc) and just used for storage the go for the big 80gig.

Also, If you already have a HD for your OS and the like... then listen to graviss as well.

**wizardPC** · 02-17-2002, 06:04 PM

yes. once you experience the greatness of 7200RPM, you'll never go back to 5400.

It's definately worth it.

**PaulzY** · 02-18-2002, 03:19 AM

yeah 7200rpm all the way, dont get sucked into ata133 its the same as ata100.

**crazyshaxs** · 02-18-2002, 03:33 AM

heres what to do.... Buy an ata raid controller like thisand then get two 40 gig 7200 drives... Then that mofoe will smoke! I havetwo 60 gig 7200 ibn deskstars with 2 megs cache raided and I can unrar like 800 megs in less than a minute and a half.. use to take me around 5 with a non raid setup.. I love it!

**MP3DUB** · 02-18-2002, 03:08 PM

only problem with a raid 0 configuration is that if one drive bites it, your fubar'd. Had this happen to me with a IBM 75GXP (the imfamous!) array. no warnings, no odd noises, just one dead drive. that and two 40gb drives and a controller will be a good bit more expensive than a single 80gb drive.

**Arby** · 02-18-2002, 08:46 PM

I have a 60Gb 7200

it used to take me about 2 minutes to load 3000+ mp3's with my old 5400 ata33, now it only takes 30 seconds.

Much faster now, in all aspects

**Aaron Cake** · 02-19-2002, 09:30 AM

Originally posted by crazyshaxs
heres what to do.... Buy an ata raid controller like thisand then get two 40 gig 7200 drives... Then that mofoe will smoke! I havetwo 60 gig 7200 ibn deskstars with 2 megs cache raided and I can unrar like 800 megs in less than a minute and a half.. use to take me around 5 with a non raid setup.. I love it!

MaximumPC did a benchmark on various RAID configurations and found that in many cases it was slower than a single drive. Stripe sets are slower writing, mirrors are slower reading and writing, etc. Best to get a fast drive as your boot drive, then a huge cheap (slow) drive as your secondary drive for things like MP3 storage.

**PaulzY** · 02-19-2002, 02:10 PM

i have a raid 0 at home, no faster

but thats caus ****t via pci bus and its a built in highpoint chip which is slow compared to promise ones.

there is a patch which inproves performance but i wasnt to backup my mp3s b4 i start messing with bios and stuff incase i get a bad stripe, but then my spare 18gig wont work now, just wont spin up or get detected in bios, so im in a stalemate situation.

raid just aint worth the effort, especially for a mp3car player, only usefull for servers.

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