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Fastest 3.5" 7200rpm HDD Today?

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ChaosInMind

Member
Joined
Jul 12, 2009
Location
Chicago
I'm going to build a RAID 10 array with 4 drives for a VMWare Workstation setup. Back in the day the Spinpoint F5's were the fastest 7200rpm drive. What is the current winner? What drives have the highest platter density at the moment? Id rather stay under 2tb if I can (1TB is ideal for cost purposes).

Thanks for the help.
 
Thats a hybrid drive...^^

Fastest one I would imagine is the Western Digital Caviar Black...Everything that isnt a Hybrid like Aya mentioned you will likely not notice the difference.
 
Seagate momentus XT 7200 rpm /8 GB SSD

Thats a bit much and I'm not sure if SSD caching built into a drive would be much help for VMware images.

I was hoping to find a 1 or 2tb drive with the highest platter density at the moment. The higher the platter density the higher the throughput.
 
Seagate XT/8GB is much faster to it's older version or standard hdd when you look on benchmarks and %'s but almost only in random transfers and even if it's 50% faster then it will be like 1MB/s vs 1.5MB/s ?
I would get WDC Black/RE4 or Seagate Constellation ( probably you won't need enterprise hdd but I'm not recommending anything from seagate that isn't enterprise series :p ) ... because of high hdd prices it will be probably WDC Black ...
 
Fastest drives would be 10k/15k drives like Velociraptors or Cheetahs.

Well I'm asking about the fastest 3.5 7200rpm HDD, with the highest platter density since I'm doing a RAID-10 setup. 4-6 HDD's. I can't do standard WD drives since they don't support TLER.
 
Well I'm asking about the fastest 3.5 7200rpm HDD, with the highest platter density since I'm doing a RAID-10 setup. 4-6 HDD's. I can't do standard WD drives since they don't support TLER.

Really. I need summer holidays. It's the tenth time in this year or so that I don't read something properly, or, if I read it, my brain ignores it.

Excuse me, then.
I'd look at something from Hitachi, or WDC Black.
 
I have a WD Cavier black...Reads peak at 155MB/s, reads at 135MB/s.
I'm happy with it.
It's a 640GB 64MB cache/SATA III drive.
 
Chaos; i dont think you'll see much of a difference when you're running 7200rmp with 64mb cache in sataIII. though i don't think the sataIII is even relevant.

personally my oldest hitachi drive has the fastest speeds (seek times); 1tb, 7200rpm, 32mb cache, sata2. my 1tb WD black 7200rmp 64mb cache sata3 is slower and LOUD as can b.

Hope that helps. pretty sure it's all marginal performance differences.
 
Chaos; i dont think you'll see much of a difference when you're running 7200rmp with 64mb cache in sataIII. though i don't think the sataIII is even relevant.

personally my oldest hitachi drive has the fastest speeds (seek times); 1tb, 7200rpm, 32mb cache, sata2. my 1tb WD black 7200rmp 64mb cache sata3 is slower and LOUD as can b.

Hope that helps. pretty sure it's all marginal performance differences.

Yes, SATA III makes no difference for a hard drive.

And I agree that WD Cavier Blacks are a bit louder then other drives. I personally don't notice it as my fans are pretty loud.
 
Yes, SATA III makes no difference for a MECHANICAL drive.

And I agree that WD Cavier Blacks are a bit louder then other drives. I personally don't notice it as my fans are pretty loud.

Hitachi or WD Black, not sure real-world you'll see much difference.
 
The Barracuda 7200.12s are some of the fastest.

My 500 is the best of a single HDD. About 130 MB/s at the beginning and about 13.8 ms random seek latency when seeking all of the HDD.

Even better when using only about 20 GB of it! 8 ms or about that.

The first 4 GB can be as low as 6 ms!
 
Fastest one I would imagine is the Western Digital Caviar Black...Everything that isnt a Hybrid like Aya mentioned you will likely not notice the difference.

Doubt it. Dont think there is a 4TB Black drive yet Higher density is almost ALWAYS faster.

Samsung/Seagate HD103SJ (Spinpoint F3 1TB)

View attachment 106518

Yes F4 are supposed to be even better. Even the F3 beats Velociraptor on transfer speeds. Access times in another story.
 
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