My current drive is a 7200 RPM. I understand there are 10,000 RPM models available (and probably faster by now). In what way are they superior? Or are they? I'm assuming so, since they cost substantially more. If they have advantages, are there special system requirements to making good use of them....more RAM, faster CPU or what have you? What would I get out of upgrading to a faster RPM besides more noise?

Could someone who knows something about this elaborate in English for those of us who are idiots with technical terms?

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I doubt there would be a significant difference in perceived performance in a typical desktop system between 7.2k, 10k and 15k RPM drives. The only time I've seen a significant increase in performance from faster rotational speeds is when the drives are used with caching RAID controllers that are designed to burst data at the drive's maximum sustained rate.

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Sorry. I'm afraid that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me either. I'm guessing that since I have no clue what a RAID controller is, I don't have one.

My new drive seems faster than my old ATA one but that may be because the processor is a Pentium, rather than a Celeron and is a 3 GH. rather than a 2....or more RAM, or something.

Edited by - randomprecision on 3/17/2007 9:54:28 AM

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Information is not always written to disks in consecutive order, and also may not be in the same area of the disk, the faster rotation means the heads can read/write the next piece of information faster. This may seem like a good thing but as Drew pointed out it does not always show up in real world, there are several reasons for this, one major one is the basic architecture of the PC and OS, another is the drives themselves (the faster you go the more errors you get and need to compensate for).

RAID=Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

Or two or more disks that are configured to look like one or more disks (to the OS) which can provide speed and/or fault tolerance.

The way this works for speed is that the drives are written/read sequentially so there is very little lag in response. Fault tolerance is an exact copy is made of one disk on the other so if one fails the other can be used.

There are other forms of RAID which I won't go into.

Your new PC most likely has a RAID controller but it most likely is not a cached one.

It's difficult to say if any speed to any single component can be attributed in that scenario, I know in my case just by upgrading cabling on my PATA setup I saw a noticeable speed improvement.

Generally the order one should take in upgrading for speed is RAM, then video adapter, then CPU and hard drive (mostly by increasing the size).

Edited by - justalurker on 3/18/2007 1:28:51 AM

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Edited by - saki on 3/19/2007 4:14:43 AM

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It's not a myth.

I striped four drives for my streaming media server at home. Worked great! Needless to say, it ain't streaming much these days and restoring all that data is going to take weeks.

The sucky thing is: I probably did it to myself by adding that fourth drive to an already stressed power supply. It ran three drives great, for months, but it failed within a week of adding that fourth drive.

You should see the tower case all this is in. It's a monster. But it needs a new power supply.

Edited by - cobalt60 on 3/20/2007 11:59:37 AM

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Right now I'm debating on installing a water cool setup. The only problem is I don't want to go through the hastles of taking out the MB (read everything) and installing the water block brace on the back.

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If you have more than one disk and are beating on them hard - Photoshop swap on one, image data on another, batch processing - then sATA can win in some situations. Few workstation or home owners notice the difference.

The Raptors are faster drives but not enough to be noticed. Beyond the faster rotation they have SCSI-class seek times. Several 7200 RPM drives have transfer rates better than the 36GB and 74GB Raptors though I don't think any match the 150GB Raptor yet.

It's probably more cost-effective to put money into DRAM than faster disks. There are definitely exceptions but they'll never come up when surfing porn sites and hence are of limited interest.

There are three versions of the 150GB Raptor. The consumer or workstation has a clear window so you can watch the head move over the platter, or try to since seeks are much faster than human perception. The server version has no window and a modified error handling mechanism better for servers but problematic for most PCs. There is also a Dell version that has no window, normal non-server error handling, and an extra 10GB or so in capacity.

A big win is reducing the number of drives – a 500GB drive is more reliable than four 120GB drives. But what you really need is a backup scheme to deal with accidental deletion situations, cats peeing on the chassis, etc – more than just disk failure.

If adding a fourth hard disk overloaded the power supply it was marginal to start with.

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I've got backups of everything, it's just scattered about and it takes time to feed media when you're copying tens of thousands of files off a couple dozen dvds. So, drink a beer, copy a copy of DVDs, come back a few days later, repeat.

I don't know if it was the power supply. I'm grasping at straws over what went wrong. The array actually went kaput when my wife pulled the ethernet cable out the back of my desktop in my bedroom while it was writing to the stripe. The "delayed write failed" popped up and the stripe has never been the same since. Drive 3 shows up as "failed or disconnected". So, who knows. It may pull a Lazarus!

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I have three relatively large capacity (considering I don't really do anything with them) drives and backups of everything so I guess I'm set for a while.

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