Hard drive questions.....

[Hammer91 0]

i just built the system below.the H/D's are ATA/66,would it be worth upgrading to a ATA/100 drive? Would i see a big difference in performance? Also, if i got a 80 GIG ATA/100 and also used one of the 40 gig ATA/66, would they run at their rated ATA speeds,or would they both run at ATA/66? Thanks for any help.

 

Hammer

[DosFreak 2]

Nope. No diff at all. The only major difference is that buying a DMA/100/133 controller/hard drive will likely be "faster" simply due to it being made with the latest technologies. The speeds (33/66/100/133) do not really affect speed that much at all. A 66 controller is the minimum I would go with nowadays however since it seems that in single drive configurations IDE drives are averaging around 40m. In RAID0 I'm thinking it's around 50+ on the DMA/133's.

 

Also sticking different speed HD's on the same controller doesn't necessarily mean that the faster HD would run at the same speed as the slower, it mostly depends on the controller type but nowadays with most modern controllers it doesn't matter. Each HD should run at their max DMA speed.

[Hammer91 0]

Thanks Dos =)

[Hammer91 0]

ok new question..... Will i see a difference going from a 7200RPM ATA/66 drive to a 7200 RPM ATA/133 drive? Thanks for the help.

 

Hammer

[zen69x 0]

No, ATA66 to ATA133 in and of itself will not be noticible.. since RPM is the same, the only things that could effect performance are... density... how many GB per platter, firmware (effects caching algorithms), or amount of cache.. which except for newer WD drives is most likely 2MB.

 

Also, as previously mentioned by Dosfreak, most drives top out 40MB/s sustained transfer. The 8MB cache versions of Western Digital's newer drives top out at like 49MB/s. The only speedup you would see is in the cache which could reach the burst rate, however, you'll still top out ~100MB/s or so even then due to PCI bus bandwidth being shared w/ other devices + overhead.

 

Also, I would add that even in a RAID0 setup, even ATA66 is sufficient as each *channel* would have 66MB/s bandwidth and since IDE only can access 1 device on the channel at a time, you can't currently exceed the bandwidth of ATA66... sustained anyhow.

[Hammer91 0]

Actually,my computer boots faster now(quite a bit faster) =) and applications open faster,thats all i notice tho,i notice no performance improvement in games. Thanks for the help.

 

Hammer

[thewizard75 0]

and that is probably entirely due to defragmentation of the hard drive when you formatted and used the new one...