Need drive recommendations

[kx7]

Hey all! I want to purchase another hdd for my pc. I recently bought the Western Digital WD6400AAKS. I use a slave for all my backups, mp3's, movies, etc, which is currently a WD3200YS. I was thinking of using the 640 as my slave, and getting a raptor 74gig for use as my main os drive. Or should i just get another 640? Oh, and i don't wish to use raid, and i don't need a big os drive.

BTW, i bought the 640 for it's performance..not it's size.

[Malpine Walis]

First :welcome: to the forums.

Now, as far as hard drives go, there are lots of numbers that you can look at and sort of come up with an idea of what to expect. However, once you actually start using a drive, you may well find that numbers on paper did not tell you much about the real world.

That much being said, since you are just looking for a drive for your OS and you are not going to use RAID, there are a few things that you might want to consider.

First, the 76gb raptor is going to cost you $150. Also, it is the older SATA that can only move 1.5 Gb/sec.

You might want to think about the 36gb raptor. It has all the same general specs but it is only going to hurt your wallet for $90.

You might also want to consider the WD caviar 160 RE2 WD1601ABYS
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136200

While it is a lot of drive for an OS, it is also only going to hit you up for $60. Performance wise, it is not a raptor but it does have SATA 3.0Gb/sec transfers and a 16 MB cache. So it is a nice drive for relatively little cash.

You could slap that puppy in your comp, make like a 15Gb partition for widows and use the rest of the space for resource hungry programs like photoshop and the like.

[kx7]

First, the 76gb raptor is going to cost you $150. Also, it is the older SATA that can only move 1.5 Gb/sec.


Hey Malpine Walis! Thanks for the speedy reply! So is my WD6400AAKS faster than that raptor drive? Where does the 1.5gb take a hit compared to a 3.0gb drive? File transfers? I want a fast os drive. I don't want it to be slower than the 640..

[Malpine Walis]

Well first, get used to speedy replies. That is how we work on most things.

As far as which drive is faster, the best answer is for you to try running some benchmarks to see what you are getting. Remember that your numbers are in part going to depend on the other hardware that you have and someone else might get somewhat different numbers.

More specifically, there are a bunch of numbers to consider when evaluating the speed of a hard drive. Probably what is going on is that the raptor is able to get your data off the platters and into the buffer faster than the AAKS. On the other hand, the AAKS with the faster transfers is able to get your data into your system faster.

Is one number better than the other? Not really unless you have one very specific application that you want to test for. In the real world, you are going to have several programs on your system and each one will be a little bit different where drive technology comes in to play.

If you look at the many sites that review hard drives, they will make a standard set-up so that they can evaluate just the hard drives from a set of perhaps a dozen. Then they will run many different tests and each drive will be better is some and worse in others.

If that is not bad enough, you can't even make a general statement such as what drive is good for games. The hardware review sites will test a set of drives with several different games and yet again, there will be no one drive that is best in every game.

As an example, here is a link that is reviewing the current 300Gb Velociraptor alongside some of the other drives that I had in mind:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/14964

While the Vraptor is mostly a top of the line product, it happens to be on the bottom tier in eight of the several dozen tests that they do.

[kx7]

Interesting read. Thanks again for your help!

[ou_phidelt]

First, the 76gb raptor is going to cost you $150. Also, it is the older SATA that can only move 1.5 Gb/sec.


I thought that even at SATA I speeds current HD technology cannot max out the bandwidth, no SATA II. Am I missing something?

Also I would not advise a 36GB Raptor. Mainly because of the size. If you use Vista you can count on a good chunk of the bat. Then game installations are growing at an alarming rate, 10GB is commonplace at this point. You seem to be a good candidate for a 150GB Raptor, if you can deal with the associated noise and heat.

[Malpine Walis]

Well, I did a little digging and it turns out that the fastest drives can saturate the 1.5 Gb bus. For the most part, the 3.0 Gb bus has been developed so that the controller will be there when faster drives become more common place.

However, since the OP apparently wants a fast drive, it is probably a good idea to look to the 3.0 bus anyway just to make sure that there is headroom that will prevent bus saturation.

[hi-yield]

Get the 150GB Raptor.
Partition.
Slap a HDD fan on it like I did.
Enjoy the speed.
Enjoy the "Sounds of Seeking"!:beer:

[tuskenraider]

I thought that even at SATA I speeds current HD technology cannot max out the bandwidth, no SATA II. Am I missing something?

Correct. They cannot saturate the 187MB/s bandwidth of the SATA 1.5Gb/s bus as there is no desktop drive that can sustain anywhere near that limit.