Will having Vista running on a fast hard drive make a difference ??

jamieufc

jamieufc

jamieufc

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For me when I buy a hard drive I just look for biggest Drive at the cheapest cost. What is the advantage of paying a bit more to get a faster drive apart from the time it takes to transfer files from one drive to another ???

is 32mb cach the best to look for ?
 
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Is that a huge big open can of worms I see over there? I think it might be.....

There are a number of different opinions on this question, some say RAID0 is quicker, some say it isn't, others say Raptors are the way to go and the deaf rich folk swear by 15k rpm SAS drives :D.

I'll go with the easy one first - 32Mb of cache isn't going to guarantee better performance. A 16Mb cache ST3250410AS 7200.10 will give virtually the same real world performance as a 500 or 750Gb 32Mb cache 7200.11 because the share the same mechanicals, the bigger cache will give a slightly better return but probably not a noticeable one.

It's difficult to say what storage setup will suit each individual, a PC is a personal computer after all and we all do different things in different ways. It might be a good idea to have a look through some of the posts on the forum and see if you can spot someone who uses their machine in a similar way to yourself and take a steer from there.
 
helmutcheese said:
Any HDD is the slowest part (Bottleneck) of any Modern PC, so the faster the better.
Click to expand...

not really true, common myth tbh.

The difference between the fastest 4 drive raid 0 and a single 16mb cache 7200 will be minimal in most circumstances. If you're doing high def vid work, and not talking the odd encode i mean real work sure faster transfer rate is king.

but other than the 4 drive raid 0 setup booting into windows marginally faster, games won't load noticeable faster, neither will most things. Vista does a fairly good job of keeping common .exe's in memory and so its starting to load a program from memory not from drives.

Check any benchmarks in reviews for hitachi/raptor/7200.11 drives. a single raptor vs raid raptors vs single hitachi and raid hitachi's showed something along the lines of 2-5% game loading time decreases from fastest to slowest responses. Even though a hitachi has what 80-90mb sustained transfer and the raid 0 setup had about 80-90% faster transfer speeds. likewise the raptor with slightly slower speeds but much faster access didn't give any boosts.

Theres lots being done besides loading, obviously, if it was 100% based on loading data then the time taken to load would have dropped a lot with a much faster setup, it didn't, in almost any game or application.


THe difference, tbh, between the fastest and slowest drives available are marginal at best. the slowest drives around now are actually pretty damned fast, and the difference between a 7200.10 with 16mb cache and a 7200.11 with 32mb cache and bigger platters are very small in real world use. sure hdtach/hdtune show prettier numbers and windows loads in 24 instead of 27 seconds, thats about the biggest difference you will see.
 
Its not a MYTH, I aint compairing HDD "A" to HDD "B", Im stating the fact a Mechanical HDD is still the slowest part of a Modern PC (has been for years and its a bottleneck).

Little bit of info from 1st result on Google search.

" In the last 25 years CPU speeds have increased by 1000x, hard disk capacities have increased by 1000x, memory speeds have effectively increased by 500x, mobo bus data transfer speeds have increased by 400x and floppy disks have been replaced by flash disks, which are 100,000x larger and 1000x faster than a 1.44MB floppy. But hard disk access times and sustained transfer rates and IOPS have only increased by around 5x. So hard disk performance is the last bottleneck in the modern PC. In fact the modern PC has become a ludicrously overspecified mechanical hard disk controller. Every component within it cycles at speeds faster than 200 MHz except the hard disk which goes at 120 Hz (7200 rpm) or 166 Hz (10,000 rpm) or 250 Hz (15,000 rpm). "


" You will not double the real world performance of your PC by buying a faster processor, or a faster graphics card or a new motherboard. In many circumstances a large RAID system of the fastest hard disks will double overall system performance. "


The best advise I was ever given was from a clever Yank from IRC #Winbeta (he worked with servers etc) was to add a 2nd HDd in Raid0, he said I am wasting my money keep upgrading Mobo/CPU etc (within reason) as I will still be wating on the slowest part, which is the HDD.
 
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Agree 100%, it's not a Myth :rolleyes:
Hard drives are indeed the slowest part in modern PC's.
For OS drive it's all about access time/spindle speed imho as windows constantly has to access lots of small files/dlls ,,etc.
So for the OS it's best to use the fastest single drive you can afford (RAID0 increase's access time). I use a single Atlas II U320 15k SCSI for my OS drive, and then some more 15k SCSI's in RAID0 for storage drives as this is where it becomes beneficial as Quickpar, Extracting large files, etc make far better use of the increased bandwidth than an OS ever would.
 
he never said them being the slowest part was a myth, rather the 'gains' you get from raiding them ect is. trust some people to get it wrong and throw rolleyes about without actually engaging that brain.

if raiding some hard drives halves your loading times id love to see it. id love you to actually prove it. there are areas where it is always beneficial, but a windows environment isnt one of them.
 
He said :

" Quote:
Originally Posted by helmutcheese
Any HDD is the slowest part (Bottleneck) of any Modern PC, so the faster the better.

not really true, common myth tbh."

He quoted me, saying its a myth and I never mentioned Raid :).

I know Raid wont make a PC 2x as fast but Faster HDD's or/andRaid can at least get the Bottleneck less.
 
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helmutcheese said:
"In many circumstances a large RAID system of the fastest hard disks will double overall system performance."
Click to expand...

who was that quote from seagate/wd/hitachi? lol

i'd say to worry about having enough memory for vista is the main priority, 4gb is the sweet spot.

sure a raptor or some decent drives in raid 0 will make the system a little more responsive but unless you're working with large files a lot including lots of archive/compression type work raid 0 is totally overated for most desktop users.
 
The "myth" is down to the types of files your looking at and using. Every time you need a file the drive has to move the heads into the right position etc etc (quoted as access time in drive stats). When using raid0 there is a small overhead to this as theres obviously small (within a certain tolerance) differences between even "identical" drives so this adds slightly to the access/seek times. In a windows environment the files you need are generally small and scattered so although when the file is being read the read is generally a good chunk faster, the slightly higher seek time can reduce the performance gain (lots of scattered, small reads) depending what files you use.

Slapping your bulk storage in a raid0 is likely to do more for you than raiding your system or games disks as your generally dealing with large (zip/movie/image) files.
 
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