Hard Drive bottleneck rant

dayloon · 21 May 2009 at 17:38

Hello All,

I wanted to have a little rant about HDD's. When you look at components such as processors or graphics cards, you can physically see that over the years they have progressed leaps and bounds. Yet HDD's are still the bottleneck that they've always been. It annoys me. OK, on paper they obviously have progressed but it winds me up that after i upgraded to an i7, 6GB RAM, Ati 4850, my PC is still clunking away like it used to. Why ? Because HDD's are just not capable to pushing the data through fast enough. I've got 2 WD 250GB drives in a raid 0 setup and while i realise they're not the newest things around, im also aware that replacing them with new drives will probably make little or no real difference. I might get better numbers in a benchmark utility such as HD Tach but ultimately, i doubt it'll make any real world difference. Do you think that there will ever be a time when HDD technology catches up with the rest of the component world (other than in a capacity sense) ? SSD drives look promising but is also very new, expensive and probably has it's share of teething problems.

Ninja Please! · 21 May 2009 at 17:53

Actually SSD makes the most since for you. Everything else in you system is cutting edge, and are performance parts. SSD's are performance drives. I also have i7 rig and buying the vertex was the best upgrade I could have done. It's a huge difference and very noticable. If you crave speed, get a good ssd, you will not regret it or ever look back.

As long as you are using Vista, newer ssd's have very little teething problems.

EDIT: Vista or win7, basically just not xp

FaceplantSi · 21 May 2009 at 17:53

You are right sir, which is why I advise so many people that SSD's are by far the best upgrade that can be done to improve overall system performance. They have had their teething troubles to be sure, but tbh that's mostly behind them now and there are some very good ones out there. Intel drives are simply the best but attract the price premium to go with their ranking, then there are the OCZ Vertex's, Samsung PBJ's and Corsair's to name a few. There are also still some of the older SSD's around which have proved more problematic but if a buyer does a little research here or elsewhere they should quickly discover which ones to avoid!

There are some decent mechanical drives around too though, and the high density platters now used and the lower price do make them very attractive to the vast majority of users, or those who do not wish to pay for SSD goodness.

I believe the next year or so should prove very interesting for data storage technology.

edit: Snap - Ninja!

Ninja Please! · 21 May 2009 at 18:08

SSD's made vista run faster than I have ever seen xp run. I know people say Vista is slower than xp, and win7 blah blah blah. Most compliments I get are about how fast and responsive Vista is on my system, which is basically a compliment on my Vertex. 1ms response time means programs open up instantly. It's a rarity to see that little blue circle that spins around. Only If I'm accessing large files on my storage hd do I even see it. Really I'm just going to keep picking up vertex's and raiding them until I reach about 250gb's. I could then use that for storage even as I only play games and dl music. I'm not interested in movies so much so I'll never need a lot of storage.

dayloon · 21 May 2009 at 18:18

Well thats interesting, thanks for the advice. So if i buy a 60GB SSD drive and use it as my OS drive, i'll notice the difference will i ?

Ninja Please! · 21 May 2009 at 18:34

dayloon said:
Well thats interesting, thanks for the advice. So if i buy a 60GB SSD drive and use it as my OS drive, i'll notice the difference will i ?

Yes. A big one. But after OS install I had 30gb left so basically I only have like 3 big games installed at the same time (mainly because gta iv is HUGE) Once I beat that game I'll gain like 16gb's of my hd back

My plan is to just buy another in the future, and raid0 them so I'll have 120gb for os/apps/games.

FaceplantSi · 21 May 2009 at 20:58

Yeah, what Ninja! said - It takes about 3 seconds on my system to open Photoshop! Can't complain at that - hate being at work now tho, everything is just so slow.

If you are using Vista then it's worth looking at vLite and doing a slipstreamed copy of the OS to remove some of the standard Vista bloatware to save space - for example one thing I removed was the language pack as I will only need English and this alone saved 1Gb from the install, there's plenty more you can trim out too. Have a look at this tutorial here.

If you are seriously looking at getting an SSD then I would say 60Gb is the bare minimum you should consider for an OS/Apps drive - they are expensive but once you have tried one you will want to put all your progs etc on and then you start running out of space quite quickly! Oh, and keep a std HDD for data storage.

If you need any suggestions as to which are good, bad, indifferent and the pro's and con's of each then there's plenty here to help with that.