Short stroked HHD or SSD

icysniper

icysniper

icysniper

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hey, not sure whether i should short stroke the seagate 1.5TB hdd

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-168-SE&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=1279

or just buy an SSD like the Crucial 64GB

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=HD-002-CR&groupid=701&catid=14&subcat=910

space is quite important as if i short stroke the seagate i will get around 300GB, and roughly the same read/write speeds of the SSD, i'm not bothered about the seek time, as that will go down, but since i have never short stoked an HDD, or had an SSD, i don't know which too choose!!!!!!!!!!!!!
 
You can partition the drive for similiar effect as short stroking.... tho thats a bit trickier to setup to make sure everything is on the correct part of the platter - and theres not too much stuff accessing the bigger partition.

Read speeds are very good with short stroking if you need high sustained speeds for whatever - but you need to sacrifice a huge amount of storage space to get anything even vaguely close to an SSD for seek times and general responsiveness...

If its raw read/write speeds then raid a few cheaper 500gig-1Tb 7200.12 drives otherwise go for the SSD. Tho if what your doing involves intensive amount of writes I'd say stick to mechanical HDDs as you'll burn teh SSD out quite fast.
 
The main advantage of an ssd is it's short seek times, even a short stroked hdd can't compete. You can just make a 300gb partition at the beginning of your drive and stick the OS on that, then make a 1.2tb partition on the rest, so you will have increased performance on the OS partition but still have the rest of the space available for storage.
 
i would prefer to short stroke the HDD, that partitioning it, as it is quicker and sounds less complicated, and i would use 1 HDD to begin with and with an extra 500GB, it would be a bit more spacious, as once the 1.5TB HDD is short stroked, i'll get about 300GB which is the same as the WD velociraptor, except £80 cheaper, and i just prefer seagate in general.
 
oh, and i should have said at the start that i already have an external HDD so space isn't really an issue, and would like the fastest speed with the most space available
 
The Segate 7200.11 is slow. The 7200.12 is fast in benchmarks but not in general, also the 500GB version is just as quick. If you want a fast 7200rpm drive then it's the Samsung F1 (the forthcoming F3's are amazing) or WD Blacks.

Partitioning is much less complicated than 'short stroking.' The first partition is the fastest one, done. There is no reason at all not to keep the rest of the space. It doesn't hurt performance in any way to use it for storage or backups.
 
Don't touch the 7200.11 with a barge pole.

7200.12 don't have the IOPS quite to backup the rest of their performance but its something you'd only notice in enterprise useage and you wouldn't be using the drives there anyhow. Also a lot of the reviews show them as slower than they actually are - seagate changed the version slightly after the first batch - the newer ones are atleast 10% faster across the board - in some cases 45% faster.
 
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