New Hard Drive

[rlemieux]

Alright, I am thinking about getting a new HD. I was concidering going with a seagate. I have a Western Digital 7200RPM. Not that I dont like it, but I have compared my PCMark scores on my hard drive and it is seriously lacking, 631 with PCmark 2002.

I want some more performance, 7200RPM is fine, dont think I need anything faster, and am looking for either a 40 or 60 gig. I am still going to use my WD, but just as a backup, and get rid of the IBM 20gig I have as a backup right now. Any suggestions?

 

[Maddman]

The new maxtor d740x harddrives are good imho. I bought one and moved my OS from an older ata100 drive to the new maxtor drive and things seem somewhat zippier. My old drive had a sustained transfer rate in the 24 - 28 mb/sec range and the new maxtor d740x has a sustained transfer rate in the 34 - 38 mb/sec range and the new drive has a higher randome access time by a full second.

 

[Revx]

The Seagates are nice drives, though the highest performing drive right now in that range would be the ibm deskstar 120gxp, but you would also have to get a cooler for it, personally i think you'd probably be happy with any 40gb 7200 you got, there isn't that huge of a real world performance difference between them all.

 

[rlemieux]

I was really thinking about an ATA133. Or maybe even a SCSI drive if that would improve perfomance by a significant amount.

 

[Xaotic]

Go with SCSI, if you can afford it. Ten and 15K RPM drives are out on the market and there are some rumors of 20K drives coming soon. It offers greater speed and reliability, adding additional drives are seldom a problem and some controllers offer continuous bad sector scanning during writes and error correction. The main drawbacks are cost and for some more impatient souls, boot speed. SCSI offers higher continuous data transfer speeds. How fast do you want go? How fast can you afford?

BTW. If you do go IDE, the Maxtors do look to offer good solid performance.

 

[Revx]

scsi is nice, but personally i don't think its worth it, for the same cash you could get a mean IDE raid array

 

[nikhsub1]

And according to tests I have read, ATA is as fast or faster in a one drive SCSI system. The new WD with the 8MB cache is faster than running 1 SCSI drive. SCSI is made for multiple users accessing data at the same time. In desktop apps this does not happen. SCSI is great for servers but you will see no benefit in your puter. Plus they run very hot and are very expensive.

 

[Revx]

well faster than a 7200rpm scsi, not a 10k or 15k rpm scsi beast, but those are ridiculously expensive