So I have been running an old school raptor harddrive (74.6gb) that is sata1 as my main OS harddrive, and I have been thinking lately and wondering if I would be better off running a SATA2 stand 7200RPM drive as my main? My original thinking is that the gain from the seek times on the 10k RPM drivbe would be more beneficial than having SATA2 in normal day to day operation, but I though i would just pose the question and see whats up.
Is there really that huge of a difference between 10k and 7.2k? I mean I know Raptor drives are awesome - but I mean for gaming I don't think it matters. Now if you are doing some huge encoding or media production then it might matter. Someone correct me if I'm wrong?
I think it can matter when loading games up and maps, but im wondering if im hurting myself more than helping
Seek times are better for OS usage than sustained speed. Neither can go faster than SATA1 bandwidth anyway so it doesnt matter what connection they have. The max sustained speed will be at the most something like 130MB/s, which is less than SATA1 speed. The thing that makes the most difference in performance of day to day things and game loading is very small random reads and writes, both of which at the most on any mechanical drive will be 2-3MB/s. This is why a solid state drive is so much better, it has almost no seek time so it can find the files incredibly quickly so you see a HUGE performance boost, and now days SSDs are optimized for random 4k reads/writes so you see even more gains from that. If you want to see the speeds for yourself on different performance categories, download CrystalDiskMark.
So if you do get a SSD should you opt for the PCI-e version or sata II, sata III. =P mmmm...sorry for hijacking
Well the newest SSDs max out SATA2 bandwidth for burst speeds and sustained reads and writes. So having a SATA3 interface is best if you can afford the best. But for the majority of disk access requests it still doesnt matter because the very small files still at best get 80MB/s for small random writes. I prefer the PCI-E interface because it doesnt have the bottleneck of SATA2 for my large file copying, and it frees up a SATA port to use for another storage drive. I dont have enough ports on my computer for the amount of hard drives I need. I am in the process of changing out my small 1TB drives over to 2TB drives and thinking about getting a 3TB drive. Back on topic, I think a Raptor would be a bit faster for normal use.
No Caviar Blacks are 7200rpm. The differences are: black - dual processor blue - single processor, somtimes lower density platters green - 5400rpm RE - has special firmware meant for RAID arrays. Black drives have problems on some RAID cards the Blue's might have moved to dual processor now too, which would mean the difference is it is older generation platter densities.
I went from a 150GB raptor to a Samsung F3, one of the fastest 1TB drives currently available. Have been noticing lag. Alot quieter though.