[Nemes]

Hello to all.
While just getting started on the Hardware scene and researching/looking into all the different ways to obtain extra performace boosts from my system, I have over the course of a week or two gained conciderable speed boosts.
Some of those boosts have been through the obvious, [but new to me] way of overclocking my system-I.E-fsb.
But by far the most significant boost I have achieved to date was through something I bought yesterday, not expecting any real major performance boost.
After countless years of bad luck on the harddrive front, always ending up with noisy drives that always, always ended up sounding like they were forever struggling to work, I finally decided that I was going to buy a drive that would last and give good service.
Now I never expected any major performace boost, but after asking around I had decided upon obtaining a harddrive that did 7200 instead of the norm of 5400.
Well I bought a Maxtor 40-gig 7200 drive, and I coudn't believe the performace boost it gave my system. It was quite remarkable really. There is now no more noise from the drive at all, it performs flawlessly and at very responsive speeds.
It has in all honesty impressed me greatly.
No longer will I now go out and buy a drive at 5400, from now on I will always buy and champion drives at the 7200 speeds.
It was really a nice surprise when I got home and installed the drive, my system no longers waits around to load programs, the drive just blinks the desired prog up in an instance
It has, [I can say quit honestly], boosted my systems performance by 255-honestly.
So the new advice I will now tell people, if asked about performace boosting ways, is going to always be,
GET A DRIVE THAT DOES 7200 HEH.
Well thats all for now.
Regards to you all.
Nemes

[Skiing Squirrel]

Oh yea, thats the only way to go nowadays. Wonder what a 15,000 rpm hd does.

[Nemes]

Heh yeah jeeez I bet a drive like that would fly.
Regards
Nemes

[Malpine Walis]

Yah, the speed of your computer is limited to the sum of it's bottlenecks. And your Hard drive is probably the biggest of the bunch.

Western Digital has a 40GB 7200rpm drive with 8MB of cache going for $91 on newegg. That would make a good replacement for my old 13GB Maxtor.

If you have the cash to drop you can do even better. You could get a pair of drives and set them up as a raid array or you could go to SCSI.

[hitman85]

i just bought a WD WESTERN DIGITAL "SPECIAL EDITION" 80GB 7200RPM EIDE HARD DRIVE from newegg for 112 last night, now its 107

[deathstar13]

malpine just stole my comments
yeh if u think the 7200 gave u perfomance boost try raid0 with 2 of em.

i ran my same setup in my mian rig 3 weeks ago with a ata33 hd.as i knew i wanted 2x7200 raid0 but its kinda expensive buying 2 hdds. so i waited.

well when i put the drives in and was installing 98se first i swear to you its was loading so fast i couldnt even read the screens that windows shows while installing.it would change before i could finish the page.

and yeh the hdd is the biggest bottle neck in todays pc's.
a good hdd is money well spent.

[DDR-PIII]

Lol i've got an older system here if I were to but a 7200rpm 40gb hdd how much would it improve over a 5400 ? the cpu is @ 466 and 256mb of sdram @ 133fsb or how bout a 15,000rpm drive ? i dont think my mobo has scsi its an intel se440bx-2 can some let me know if scsi will work on this ?

[deathstar13]

well it would depend alot of if the 5400 hdd was ata100 or ata33
a 5400 ata 100 you wont see a big diff.
but if its ata33 or ata 66 an upgrade will help.

back on scsi.this is a very expensive route.
i like the middle route.2x7200 ide raid0 isnt to bad on the $$$ and is rather fast

check this out also http://www.extrememhz.com/ibmultra-p1.shtml

[hitman85]

i have a question, does the buffer of the drive boost the performace up, i bought the one with 8mb instead of 2mb?

[Nemes]

Yeah Deathstar13 I don't know if my old drive was ata33 or not, it's the seagate 20gig drive described in my sig...but the performance boost was very noticeable.
The old seagate specs when I looked it up said ATA/66 8.9ms so maybe it is ATA 66 I don't know, I am not up on hardware a great deal as I am just getting into the whole hardware thing...believe me the bug has bitten bad heh.
I am interested in the raid0 that others have spoken off, I might after the new yr, give it another try with another of the drives I have just bought. Buying another one and then doing this raid0 thing might be a nice boost and an interesing test for me.
Something else for me to get my teeth into heh.
Regards
Nemes

[Malpine Walis]

Originally posted by hitman85
i have a question, does the buffer of the drive boost the performace up, i bought the one with 8mb instead of 2mb?

The larger the buffer the greater the chance that the next thing you would need would be availiable. That being said, most drives only have a 2MB buffer. 2MB is the minimum around these days because that is the point beyond which the buffer become less relevant to your I/O requirements.

Drives with 8MB buffers show only a little improvement and not very often. Asuming that the price is the same between two drives of the same capacity, the 8MB drive would show a marginal improvement.

However, if you are considering drives of different capacity, the minor extra cost of extra buffer would outweigh the extra expense of an 80GB drive over a 40 GB drive.

[FTC]

Hi,

While it is true that modern (7200) and fast drives give a considerable boost over older ones (5400), this feeling can be usually exagerated by the fact that when moving to a new drive you are effectively reinstalling the operating system and/or starting over with an unfragmented drive... and this alone, without really improving hardware, gives a noticeable boost.
So be warned, and expect performance to degrade a bit with time... however, congratulations for your new drive

Regards
FTC