HD Question

[pavvel]

I was wondering if someone could give me some advice on hard drives.

I currently have a Western Digital 320GB 8MB Cache drive as my main drive and was wondering if this is ok?

I see that Seagate and WD now do 32mb cache drives and use perpendicular drive plates, Would these make a lot of difference to the speed of the OS? as they are both 7200 RPM?? or would only the 10,000 and 15,000 make a noticeable difference if any?

Many thanks

[C00kie]

I currently have a Western Digital 320GB 8MB Cache drive as my main drive and was wondering if this is ok?

Sure, why not...

I see that Seagate and WD now do 32mb cache drives and use perpendicular drive plates, Would these make a lot of difference to the speed of the OS? as they are both 7200 RPM?? or would only the 10,000 and 15,000 make a noticeable difference if any?

Cache memory on the disk can be used for the following:
* Store read/written data temporarily, so if the data is asked for a second time it can be retrieved fast from cache instead of moving the head to the required position and read it from disk
* Read ahead some data blocks (prefetching) so sequential file access is faster
* Postpone write operations while telling the application it's done (so it can continue working for you) and execute them in an order that's more efficient (less head movement)

Windows also does some caching by itself, so the real-world benefits are somewhat questionable. With a larger cache you may get better figures from a benchmarking utility while not noticing any improvement in daily use.

Perpendicular recording increases drive capacity per square inch, not the transfer speed. Although less surface also means less distance for the head, so it does benefit speed somewhat.

More rpm's should give faster data transfer indeed. This comes at a cost since the drives are more expensive. So it boils down to weather to you the money is worth the improvement.


There are actually two benchmark figures in HD specs you should look at: seek time and data transfer rate. Speed of the OS depends more on a low seek time (reading/writing lots of different files) than high data transfer rate (reading large files.) More RPM's influences the data rate (MB/sec) but not the seek time (how fast can the head move from one side of the disk to the other.)

And if you really want to improve performance, you should install two or three seperate disks and spread workload between them. One disk for OS and programs only, another for large sample libraries and another one for large audio files.

[pavvel]

Thanks very much for the reply cookie, was very useful.

Thanks