Hard drive RPM?

[Brian Frank 0]

Okay, how much of a performance gain are we talking between a 7200rpm and a 5400 rpm ata100 hard drive. I play Half-life and UT as the main things that really tax my system at all. Is a 7200rpm really gonna be a major contributor to this stuff like video editing or what?

[Down8 0]

as I understand it [i'm sure I'll be corrected], the RPMs deal more with access times than anything else, so once your game is loaded, the RPMs don't matter as much.

 

-bZj

[Dirty Harry 0]

A HD is not a motorbike!

Speed of a HD is dependant on many factors, rpm beeing only one of them. For example HD:s come with various amounts of cache, 512k to 2MB on standard IDE drives. This can affect performance a lot. The number you want to look at judging HD:s is the MB/sec average transfer rate, but how that translates on your PC with your apps is a different story.

 

In most tests, the fastest HD:s are the 7200RPM ones, but I've seen a number of tests where *some* of the 5400 drives being faster than *some* of the 7200 ones. It's anyhow clear that more Rpm could be faster, everything else beeing equal.

 

No, there is not going to be a huge difference between 5400 and 7200rpm, but propably a bigger one than between ATA66 and ATA100, which many say is only a theoretical one.

 

That said, if you are buying a drive because you want more space, I'd still recommend to buy an 7200 rpm ATA 100, the price is not really that much higher (than 5400/ATA66).

 

If you again want a faster system and are looking at the HD being the bottleneck you've got two options; RAID (smaller gain) or SCSI (big bucks). Or both, by all means.

 

H.

[Brian Frank 0]

It appears that hard drive rpm isnt as big of a contributing factor as I first thought.

I really wasnt sure how much it affected overall performance--which its nothing needed, unless hdd speed is crucial, and then thats what scsi is for.

[lexluthor 0]

there are 2 different things working here. transfer speeds and access time. they are very different. rpm's usually = better access time but the transfer rate is bottlenecked by the interface controller.

ata/100 does burst transfer rate for buffer to host at 100mb/s (mode 5 ultra ata)

utlra 2 scsi does the same at 80.

there are 3 different transfers working here. platters to buffer, buffer to host, host to processor/memory. the total thruput from platter to processor is the real key here.

all in all in straight speed the ultra/100 is faster than a uw2 scsi, the neet thing about scsi is the bidirectional multi channel configuration. basically a scsi system can do a bunch more stuff at the same time with little to no performance decrease.

for instance playing with my system i can burn a cd (cd-rom to cdrw or hd to cdrw) while doing hd benchmarks. without creating the dreaded coaster, and with a very small performance hit.

u can kinda simulate the same thing with a "raid" setup for dma equipment.