fast hdd for os

robgti · 27 May 2008 at 07:22

Im looking to buy a new hdd this Friday and would like the fastest possible to have my os on it. I will have around £100 for it. What do you all recommend?

nightwish · 27 May 2008 at 08:45

Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache

robgti · 27 May 2008 at 09:10

is that not just the same speed as the 500GB versions?

Servo · 27 May 2008 at 10:15

robgti said:
is that not just the same speed as the 500GB versions?

No it's faster, bigger cache, and the new bigger platters.

nightwish · 27 May 2008 at 10:20

I believe that the 640GB version (currently on pre-order) uses the same platters as the 1TB drive, so should be as fast if you don't need the size of the 1TB. Has less cache too, but not sure whether you'd notice that in the real world.

There's also a 320 GB version, again with the same size platters that should also be around the same speed, but OCUK don't stock that (yet).

milkinc13 · 27 May 2008 at 10:30

the fastest drive but only on seek in that budget would be the 74gig Raptor, other than that one of the high density platter drives

Andeh · 27 May 2008 at 11:59

Raptors are over-rated. Go for a Samsung drive as stated above.

1kiwi · 27 May 2008 at 12:08

i would rather have a raptor for my OS drive due to the seek times.

robgti · 27 May 2008 at 12:14

At the moment im using 3x500GB samsung drives and 2x400GB samsung drives but want to put the 3 500GB HDD's in external storage and keep the others in the pc. Just would like the os to load quicker and be on a separte HDD to the rest of my data.

clocka · 27 May 2008 at 12:28

go for the 640GB Samsung F1 then, its the same speed as the 1TB version in benchmarks and around £60, its in stock now on ocuk. £35 ish cheaper than the 1TB.

robgti · 27 May 2008 at 13:03

if the HDD im using for my os was nearly full. Would that cause problems loading etc?

clocka · 27 May 2008 at 14:19

yes, a full drive = a slow drive, atleast if its you are on about the partition your windows installation is on.

robgti · 27 May 2008 at 15:36

its just i have a problem at the moment with the desktop taking ages to load and then sometimes restarting itself. I have started to move stuff out of there now tho

clocka · 27 May 2008 at 15:52

try formatting, you might need a fresh install of windows.

AbsenceJam · 27 May 2008 at 15:57

The amount of free disk space has no impact upon performance.

clocka · 27 May 2008 at 16:07

not true mate, you need space for the swap file and also your drive will become fragmented and you need quite a bit of space to defrag it.

AbsenceJam · 27 May 2008 at 16:19

There can be fragmentation with any amount of space free, not having space for the pagefile will cause issues which is quite seperate to "slow drive."

clocka · 27 May 2008 at 16:56

true but you need about 12% ish of the drive spare to be able to do a full defrag.

AbsenceJam · 27 May 2008 at 17:02

The XP defrag utility won't run when there's less than 15% free as I can recall but that's meaningless. Other utilities only require a tiny amount of free space and in some cases make use of other drives.

clocka · 27 May 2008 at 17:04

nah, im on about Raxco PerfectDisk 2008 Pro, that requires around 12% and is arguably the best defrag tool there is.