Advice concerning hard drives

[Andydigital]

OP stands for "original person" i.e. the person who started the thread.

I've got a 36gb Raptor and its the noisiest thing i've ever heard in a PC, i've got a Coolermaster Cosmos case which stores its HDD's in caddies that are sound proofed with rubber gromets to isolate the drives from the case to stop vibration and you can still hear the Raptor when the head is shooting across the disk. It sounds a little like hail falling on a tin roof when doing the random access test in HDTACH.

Now the Samsung Spinpoint 501LJ 500GB £65 drive i recently put in is practically inaudible in this case even when running HDTACH to benchmark the drive. The Raptor you can hear from the other side of my flat ( I'm not exaggerating) when doing the same benchmark, the Spinpoint you can only hear if the room is quiet and you stick your ear a foot or two away from the case. The Spinpoint benches at 90mb a sec down to 45mb at its slowest, the Raptor goes from 65mb a sec down to 45mb a sec.

[TooNice]

@raverbaby (I use 'OP for 'original poster' simply because it is quicker to type - no offense intended ): I remember now, you made that post in the Scan board about whether to go 8GB of RAM or no didn't you?

If you want to give a good, relatively modern 7200 RPM drive a go, and are willing to add another £10 to your budget, then look into the 500 GB Western Digital AAKS. For £50 you can have a Samsung T166 (maybe - if you look hard enough). In practice, they are both excellent drives: the AAKS is a bit faster yet quiet, the T166 slightly quieter yet fast.

What you may want to do, is to partition the first, say, ~£100GB of the drive (or even a bit less) and use this partition for transfer rate intensive applications (i.e. anything that you find is causing your current HD to trash). The first partition created uses the outer edge of the drive, and tend to perform better than the inner end.

[HSK]

I had 2 7200rpm drives in raid 0 in the past, quite a noticeable improvement in performance.but i'd say mainly in large data transfers, and loading times for game (large data).