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Speed Differences?

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Aug 7, 2008
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Hi,

Performance wise:

Is there a noticeable difference between 7200RPM and 10000RPM? Also, is there a noticeable difference between 16MB cache and 32MB cache?

Thanks in advance.
 
performance wise of course there is a speed difference in actual throughput.... but whether or not you as the end user will actually notice it is the question.

I have a raid setup with four hardrives running in Raid 0 as one drive... its theorethically four times faster than using a single drive... though to be honest I cant really feel much of a speed difference when i compare it to my other rigs.
 
alright thanks. What about the cache difference?
 
ive heard and i could be wrong as I dont have physical documented proof... that you will notice a difference between 8mb cache & 16mb cache... but not so much between 16mb & 32mb.

Though with all of these the difference is so minimal... it really is ;)
 
you'll notice difference in load times and windows start up.
 
Hi Moonpig, good questions. 7200rpm vs 10,000rpm: depends. A single Hitachi Ultrastar 7200rpm drive "feels" the same in Windows as a 10,000rpm Raptor. However, a WD5000AAKS does feel slower in Windows than does a Velociraptor. It's better to select an individual hard drive on its own merits than based on its rotational speed. BTW, to me a WD6400AAKS "feels" about the same in Windows as does a Velociraptor. Obviously these are all subjective impressions.

As for cache: yes! This is going to depend on the drive, but I easily noticed a difference going from WD 250 with 8MB of cache to a WD 250 with 16MB of cache. Was it a huge difference? No. But things in general loaded more quickly and were a bit snappier. Looking at the drives on the market, I'd say that for what you generally pay for more cache, it's worth kicking it up to 16/32 from 8/16 in most cases. It's generally a small price to pay for something that does effectively reduce some bottlenecks.

Hope it helps. :)
 
sure does TIGR. Thank for that. Really summed it up.
 
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