fastest 500gb HDD's?

Associate
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I've been looking at getting Either the Western Digital Caviar Black 500GB 32mb Cache Or the Samsung Spinpoint F3 500GB 16mb Cache. I know that Cache Memory is Fast access memory, so i assume More is better? Though i heard the Samsung F3 was supposed to be really good.

I would like to get Two of the same hard drives and put them in Raid 0 , i gather that this increases performance? If so would it match a WD velociraptor 300GB HDD in terms of speed? How exactly does Raid 0 Work? Does it show both HDD's in desktop an you can store Data on either?

Any recommendations? :p
 
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Man of Honour
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13 Oct 2006
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The seagate 7200.12 500gig is by some margin the fastest for raw read speeds... (110-120Mb/s avg).

If you seriously want a fast HDD setup without spending for an SSD then get a couple of 1.5tb 7200.12s and short stroke them in RAID0.
 
Soldato
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Raid 0 will improve read and write speeds. It will very slightly worsen seek times.

The raptor is quick because of its quicker than normal seek times. SSDs are ludicrous because their seek times are just about zero. So while raid 0 will be quicker, in some senses it will always be slower than a raptor or an ssd.

Oh, raid 0 is about twice as likely to fail as one drive, so back up your data.
 
Soldato
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Seems everyone has a different opinion on speeds, which to my mind means that they are very similar so probably go with the cheapest or brand you have most confidence in. Maybe a more pertinent question would be which is mor reliable? But given all the posts I have read about this (I am also in the market for a 500GB drive) the opinion will be evenly split again.

I think the WD Black for me, don;t know why exactly but may change my mind when I press buy.
 
Soldato
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It's not a matter of opinion, there are plenty of benchmark results available. The F3 and 7200.12 smash the Black with its much lower platter density and the F3 is a nice improvement over the 7200.12 as Seagate drives just never seem to perform very well.
 
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