Advice concerning hard drives

[Blitzen]

For the enthusiast it's worthless. But if someone is saying "Why won't Crysis work at ultra setting on my high spec PC" and they have a Windows experience score of 2 then you can tell them that their PC is crap

I get a 5.9 for my 512mb X1950xt so apparently you can't get better than that

Yep.......i think MS should drop it or use it to its full potential.

[306maxi]

Yep.......i think MS should drop it or use it to its full potential.

But it also gives you a clear indication that someone knows nothing about PC's if you see their Vista experience scores in their signature

I was fully expecting Microsoft to constantly update the scores so that 5.9 isn't always the maximum score because in a few years 5.9 will be the score a fairly middle range card. Perhaps they'll do something soon.

[GaryRW]

yep - my rig is not high spec to say the least and scores 5.9 for everything except cpu (and even my overclocked e2140 gets 5.6!). so yes, pap, but if the hard drive score is 2, gives an indication it really is behind.

I also thought the whole idea of setting it at 5.9 max was that they would in time increase and update it. (maybe sp1? haven't tried the beta)

(i'm starting to get an urge to watch spinal tap again, it must be lourder, it goes up to 11...)

[306maxi]

Oh, I have a 74GB 16MB cache Raptor, wish I never bought it

I have a 36gb 16mb cache raptor and I'm very happy I bought it When I'm playing games they load up just that bit faster. Although 36gb is a big limitation. I have Vista, the orange box and not much else installed and I only have a few Gb left. So I think I might find myself buying another raptor soonish.

I just wish Seagate would try and make a fight of it and make some 10k desktop drives as this would help push the price of the raptors down.

[306maxi]

yep - my rig is not high spec to say the least and scores 5.9 for everything except cpu (and even my overclocked e2140 gets 5.6!). so yes, pap, but if the hard drive score is 2, gives an indication it really is behind.

I also thought the whole idea of setting it at 5.9 max was that they would in time increase and update it. (maybe sp1? haven't tried the beta)

(i'm starting to get an urge to watch spinal tap again, it must be lourder, it goes up to 11...)

ROFL.

What spec is the hard drive? That's a really crap score!

Just checked the G/F's PC and her 250gb Seagate gives a score of 5.4.

[peterb]

If disk drive performance really IS that critical for you, you might want to look at a SCSI drive or SAS drive, some of which have rotational speeds of 15,000 RPM - with noise and heat output to match. However you will need a high performance SCSI or SAS card, which in itself - before the drives - won't be cheap. How much is performance worth?

[DeViTTo]

If disk drive performance really IS that critical for you, you might want to look at a SCSI drive or SAS drive, some of which have rotational speeds of 15,000 RPM - with noise and heat output to match. However you will need a high performance SCSI or SAS card, which in itself - before the drives - won't be cheap. How much is performance worth?

Yep but price normally is an issue however.

The best solution for you to alivate the slownesss of the hard drive you have if your motherboard supports it is to buy 2 WD 1500AFD non Raptor X, they are just for show (clear glass window) and raid them in Raid 0 config. Keep all your saved data on your old drive as backup.

Use something like Acronis if you want to keep a good backup. I personally have 2 Raptors in raid0 and 4 Atlas 15k II on Perc 4/dc Pci-e card also in Raid0. The SCSI's are supremely better for my usage of my computer, but for sheer value the Raptors are superb. Even individually they are a good upgrade.

Check out storagereview.com and the hard drive performance tables. The Raptors lead a lot of the SCSI drives that cost way more. BTW noise is not an issue with the Raptors or the Samsung they are quite IMO.

If price is an issue otherwise consider the Samsung Spinpoint HD501LJ T166 500GB 16mb cache
at around £60. They are fast for what they are and have beaten Raptors in certain game loadings, I have one in a Qnap ts109pro.

[GaryRW]

What spec is the hard drive? That's a really crap score!

Sorry - just an example score. I should've made it clear when I first suggested the whole experience score thingy that I have no idea what the range of scores are. (We should start a new competition - what's the worst experience score you've been able to get...)

my point was just that if the OP's drive scores really low on the experience score, then (i think!) it's a clear indication it really needs an upgrade

[306maxi]

Bah I'm still asleep. DIdn't read your post properly

[DeViTTo]

The raptors are now quite old, and the only significant advantage they have is faster seek times (i.e. how quick it takes them to get to the bit of data they need), simply because they're spinning faster. With actual read/write times, I think the newer 7200 rpm have mostly caught them up. Of course the new 7200rpm ones are much cheaper and quieter than the raptors! It may be that just buying one of the samsung t166s that alsenior mentioned would make a difference. (i recently chose the 500gb t166 becuase i think it's a good price/performance/capacity ratio at the moment)

I'm sure i've seen a few articles saying raid 0 with 2 new drives is quicker than a single raptor (again, raptor may be ahead on seek times)

The 73gb are quite old but the 150GB Raptors are not and they are by far the best performance hard drives out at present. Again check out performance tables at storagereview.com.

With regard thrashing of hard drive in Vista, its a known thing check if you have unwanted services running, and Google Thrashing hard drives in Vista it might enlighten you that it may be the OS not so much your old hard drive.

[oralpain]

I like storage review, but a lot has changed recently and they are slow to update their reviews and tables.

Raptors are still king when it comes to raw, relative, access times, but there are 7200 rpm drives that leave them in the dust where raw transfer rates are concerned, and even a handful of 7200rpm drives that are faster for most uses (including gaming).

Both WD and Samsung are releasing some very impressive looking 7200rpm drives with massive platter sizes. Other companies will follow shortly.

It won't be more than 6-12 months before the currently existing raptors are out-classed in nearly every way by 7200rpm drives.

[DeViTTo]

I like storage review, but a lot has changed recently and they are slow to update their reviews and tables.

Raptors are still king when it comes to raw, relative, access times, but there are 7200 rpm drives that leave them in the dust where raw transfer rates are concerned, and even a handful of 7200rpm drives that are faster for most uses (including gaming).

Both WD and Samsung are releasing some very impressive looking 7200rpm drives with massive platter sizes. Other companies will follow shortly.

It won't be more than 6-12 months before the currently existing raptors are out-classed in nearly every way by 7200rpm drives.

Probably progress lol but they still are king for SATA performance. Storagereview do take a time updating I know. I have 2 Raptors in Raid0 with sustained 132mb transfer burst about 250 I think, against the 4 scsi at 200mb sustained and burst 360-400 odd. I yhave allways been a SCSI person but the Raptors are good value against SCSI, but maybe not so good value against high capacity SATA drives now appearing.

[alsenior]

What didn't occur to me is to use 3 drives rather than 2. Alsenior - can you set up a raid 0 with 3 drives them on the intel matrix system? (I'm on ich9r chipset). Is that noticeably quicker than with 2 drives?

Apparently you can it would be best to consult your manual though.im looking through the product manual now
Edit: you can only do it with 4 drives

[TooNice]

One of the problem is that the OP didn't specify what applications s/he is running. Does the HD thrashes all the time? If so, then there might be a problem with the system.

The fact that you can hear the HD seeking noise is no indication that the HD is holding the system back anymore than it would with another HD/RAID setup. Any HD will have to seek when loading applications, audibly or not (except perhaps SSD drives). For what it's worth, I find the Raptor to be noisier than the most quiet 7200 RPM drives currently available, but also quieter than other 7200 RPM drives: my Hitachi is louder on idle, and my Seagate much louder on seek.

RAID-0 and a faster single HD will improve performance in different aspects. RAID-0 will improve applications where sequential transfer rate is important (e.g. Windows loading, extracting a single large archive, video editing). A modern 10k RPM HD will typically be faster where random access is important (e.g. copying lots of smaller files, most games loading time, and pretty much anything that does not fall into sequential transfers - even though in many cases, it's faster in areas where you won't notice).

When running applications where RAID-0 provides an improvement, adding more drives (e.g. 4) should yield additional performance. But for everything else, it will do absolutely nothing (technically, there is even the cost of an overhead). So it's important to find out what HD intensive applications you need to run (to make it more complicated, many applications are neither purely sequential nor random in their read/write e.g. they may write medium sized block here then there). Personally, I favour a 10k RPM + a 7200 RPM storage drive approach vs two 7200 RPM drives in RAID-0 for my use. RAID-0 advocates will disagree. It's pretty much an endless debate where there is probably no absolute truth.

What is kind of interesting is to look at some of the cheaper SSDs out there (very low access time but with only 30MB or so sustained transfer rate). From a number of reviews I've seen Googling around, the Raptor demolishes them in transfer rate intensive tasks, not unlike how 2x 7200 RPM drives do the same to Raptors for those very tasks, yet there are instances where those drives beat the Raptor (again, the very tasks where the Raptor would beat RAID-ed 7200 drives).

[raverbaby]

(To be fair fella, you state you rig as 'high spec'.......its not. There very few that can claim that...)

In terms of what I want of it, it is. I work exclusively with audio editing and production in my own self proclaimed capacity.

[raverbaby]

thanks for all the comments and advice so far guys. I'm intrigued, why are people referring to me as 'OP' as oppose to Raverbaby?

I should have stated in my post, i'll be exclusively using audio editing and production related applications. No gaming, hence why 8600 is 'high spec' for the set up.

The drive i have the OS installed on is apprxoimately 3-4 years old. And the noise really irritates me.

So perhaps, for a budget of £50 what's the fastest (and relatively silent) hard drive that I can buy? Drive capacity can be anything as low as 40gb, i already have 2TB of hard drive space for non-OS stuff.