Help. Need a new Hard Drive

[Koolpc]

Looking for a new Hard drive. Not looking for a big capacity one as i use an External HD for all my backups etc. What i am after though is a fast Hard Drive that i will notice when Vista is booting up etc.

I currently have a WD 160g sata HD.

Any ideas? It will also be storing some programs and the odd game. Speed is what i need!! Thanks

[Zhaoman]

Same thread that I started lol! I asked what was the largest density hard drive on the market today and this is what staffsMike had to say:

"when they are in stock these are single platters
http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s...html?SAM-F1320

I've not seen any WD single platters yet.

Either that or get the 640GB's. That way you will know for sure"

That drive is the Samsung Spinpoint F1 320Gb and it consists of one 320Gb platter with 16Mb cache which should be ferociously quick. The new 640Gb Western Digital Caviar AAKS was the other drive staffsMike was refering to. It uses 2 320Gb platters giving it double the storage and a 16Mb cache. Hope that helps;

[looney]

or you could get this: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142569

which is also single platter

[Arminas]

To speed up booting, you could keep your current HDD and get another one (of the same size) and put them in RAID 0 (if your mobo supports it).
I recently put a pair in my new build....the start up speed is noticeably faster on Windows Vista x64...my friend tells me faster than a Raptor (the ones that run at 10000RPM )

Info on RAID 0 can be found on Wikipedia, search RAID then go to levels, then RAID 0

[Koolpc]

or you could get this: http://www.ebuyer.com/product/142569

which is also single platter

Is that one definitely a single platter one?

Are Scan going to get any in stock? Guys?

[looney]

yep it is i have it myself and its very good,

check this out:

Delivers 320-GB capacity on a single platter

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.js...&reqPage=Model

[Koolpc]

Is it fast at booting up pc etc?

[Zhaoman]

Yes it is

[C-Bag7]

I changed from 2 250gb seagate 7200.10 in raid 0 to 2 750gb samsung F1's also in raid 0 and its shaved about 15-20 secs off my boot times. It was the main reason i upgraded my drives, that and to reduce game load times etc.

[Koolpc]

But i don't want to raid. I just want a fast boot drive.

[C-Bag7]

I was just using my experience as an example, I replaced a seagate array for an F1 array and my boot times decreased, so therefore you should experience a similar decrease in boot time going from a single WD 160gb to a single F1.

I used my set up as an example of the performance increase i gained from using the F1's. I went from a raid 0 array to a raid 0 array so i feel it still showed how much quicker the drives are and would be even for a single drive setup.

[Koolpc]

You can't get the 320g F1's? Are they available? Is the Seagate as fast?

[C-Bag7]

Just trying to help

[Koolpc]

Just trying to help

Very much appreciated mate. Cheers

[Zhaoman]

lol, any 320Gb single platter drive would be just as fast, the data is packed so tight that a huge amount of data can be accessed from each spin, so a high density 7200rpm would be much faster than a low density 10,000 rpm. As long as its got a 320Gb platter, any manufacturer should do fine.

The 750Gb F1 uses 250Gb platters which used to be much denser than the Raptors (hence why it managed to outperform the most expensive disk at the time). Now though new 320Gb platters have been released which should see another huge boost in speed. These are the drives to get.

[Koolpc]

So the Seagate is a good one to go for then? This one:

Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 320GB SATA-II 16MB Cache ST3320613AS