What HDD?

ubersonic

ubersonic

ubersonic

Soldato
Joined
26 May 2009
Posts
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Hiya, some advise please as im not the best on hard drives, my current motherboard is a XFX 750I INTEL 775 DDR2 Motherboard and im using a 80gb Seagate Barracuda ATA/133 HDD (dont laugh) and im looking to upgrade, my cpu is a Q9600 and I have 4gb of DDR2-1066 in duel channel.

The HDD proberbly seems a bit lackluster for the system but until now ive been doing mostly CPU intensive work with little to no HDD use. Things have changed and I now requre something faster, I have the following options:

1: instal a ADAPTEC 29160 PCI-64 card I have spare in one of the PCI slots (card is PCI 64/32 compatible) and use a 15000rpm 72k U320 drive (which is backwards comp with U160 cards) I also have spare

2: buy a Samsung EcoGreen F3 500GB (my board is SATA II) for £39

3: try and get a 74gb raptor 10k from ebay cheap

I dont care about drive size or sustained transfers much its fast burst access im after for quickl loading small files into memory, so any ideas? I dont mind spending £40 on a F3 but will it be faster than the SCSI drive? if so how much, the SCSI drive is a U320 but its connected to a U160 adapter which is in a PCI slot so I guess it will be limited to a max of 133mb/s transfer? how will this effect it compared to the F3? and how does the raptor fit into my plans?

Thank you very muc for the help
 
I agree with not going got the ecogreen F3, but rather the proper F3 (the 7200 rpm version). It probably still isn't as fast as the SCSI solution though - although I can't say for certain having not tried the SCSI.
 
thanks, so im looking at £45 for the F3 then...

btw the stats on my spare SCSI drive are:

Size: 73GB
Speed: 15,000RPM
Interface: SCSI 68pin
Sustained Throughput (MBps): 56.1 to 86.0
Average Seek Time (read/write ms): 3.6 / 4.0
Interface: SCSI LVD U320 - 320MBps 16-bit
Cache: 8MB
 
None of those options, but (as already suggested) the 500GB Samsung Spinpoint F3...you would only use the EcoGreen (or any "Green" HDD) if it was just for storage and not for booting from.

The SCSI setup would be hindered by being connected to PCI bus (as you suggest), you may have faster access times, but overall performance would be considerably better with the Spinpoint F3, also would that SCSI not be rather noisy...
 
Hello Every Body.
It's an excellent question.
A hard disk drive hard drive is a non-volatile storage device that stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating rigid platters with magnetic surfaces.

Thanks
 
thanks for the info, my choice is defiantly between the F3 (non eco) and my Cheetah now

do you know how faster the F3 would be? worth spending £45? I don't care about the noise/heat from the Cheetah.

Also would a single U160 HDD actually bottleneck on the PCI bus? I know my U160 adapter was aimed at the PCI-64 market but that was because you can connect a truckload of drives to it. Will one U160 HDD be enough to saturate the PCI bus? (my dvd drive is SATA)
 
a u160 should be able to run ok on the pci bus, u can even get single channel u160 controllers for pci

it should be pretty quick, especially with a 15k drive. Althou it wont be anywhere near the speed of a u320 running on pci64
 
It seems the universe does sort itself out, a family member needs a new hdd so im going to buy them a F3 and test it and the cheetah in my rig to see what works best, then ill keep them the best one ^^

Thanks for all the help
 
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