Quicker hard drives, how much difference do they make in the real world?

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At the moment i have a western digital 320gb 7200rpm 16mb cache drive with my i7 rig.

How much difference would a velociraptor or a SSD make to gaming and video editing etc. Are there any benchmarks you could point me to.

Ps.
surely more ram compensated for a slower drive?
 
Storagereview.com is a good place for general drive comparisons.

However much ram you've got the information has to go to and from the drives at some point.

I've always found that Raptors (and 10 or 15K SCSI) do make PCs feel a lot 'snappier' and I wouldn't go back to 7.2K drives for the OS.
 
You notice the response more than the throughput. It depends what you need. If you have the spare cash then the Velociraptor is a very nice drive.
 
I just got a veloci yesterday to replace my WD 640GB as my OS + Game drive. It's a really nice piece of kit, benches at about 130MB max but Vista hasn't finished playing with it yet. When it's done I'll post benchmarks of both.

Also, search for the HDD benching thread, loads of them in there :)
 
my ssd knocked about 5 secs of boot up time 7-8 secs of warhead loading screens compared to my old 7.2k drive
 
Assuming you've got 6GB of RAM because 3 seems like a silly amount to have with an i7.

A HDD only affects loading times assuming nothing is ever swapped to the pagefile. Sadly this isn't the case but it won't hurt too much. A faster HDD will decrease the loading times of large files (video editing) and will speed up game loading times. I'm running 2 Seagate 500GB 7200.11's in RAID 0 128k stripe (I think) and games do load quicker for me than friends. Once in the game, it has no effect on how it plays though.

A velociraptor doesn't have faster read/write speeds than any other HDD on the market as far as I'm aware. What it does have, which is it's selling point, is low access times. This affects the loading of multiple, small files like the one's that your OS will use which is why raptors are recommended as OS drives.

Hope that helps :)
 
Sorry forgot to mention about boot times, my Veloci has knocked about 5 seconds off, but again I still think it's getting used to everything. I did a direct ghost from my old WD and will be formatting my Veloci soon I think, as when I ran a bare vista on it it did the vista part of the boot in about 15 seconds, instead of the 30 it does now.
 
7200 drives in RAID 0 are far quicker than a single 10k HDD and much much better value. Pretty much same as everyone else, boot times, load times are noticeably quicker; moving data around your hard drive is obviously much faster.

For a further increase in speed, you can RAID 3 or 4 drives as oppose to 2, each drive added increases read/write but compensates reliability. I believe more than 4 drives and you need a RAID controller ;)
 
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