Please Explain about GB/s and RPM on HDDs ???

[BuckSkin]

I already know what someone is going to say, but money is tight and I just cannot afford a SSD at the present.

With that out of the way, without getting overly technical --- and thus way over my head ---, concerning HDDs, which is the most governing factor in how quick a system responds, GB/S rating or RPM rating ?

Considering booting up and running various programs (in this situation, file transfers and storage would not be an issue), all other factors being the same, which would make the machine more quick to respond, a 7200 RPM SATA 3.0 GB/S or a 5400 RPM SATA 6.0 GB/S ?
And, would the difference be noticeable to the average bear ?

Considering my most recent experience in having to replace the O/S in one of our machines, it put me to thinking; that machine has a single 2TB HDD with the O/S on one partition, photos on another partition, and everything else on a third partition.

I got the bright idea that, if I were to obtain two identical small capacity HDDs, say 160 GB or so, I could put the O/S, and ONLY the O/S on both of the small HDDs, one in the machine and the other ready to be put into action at a moments notice, and relegate the big 2TB HDD to being the secondary internal HDD; thus, whenever something goes awry, I don't have to mess around with making sure everything is safely backed up and whatnot, just plug and play.

Thanks for reading.

 

[Layback Bear]

Hard drive with higher rpm's will be faster.

To make things easier, please post a web site to the hard drives in question.
Do you want the hard drives to be internal? Sata connection off the motherboard.

Please put the model number of your Dell in your 'My System Specs'

Jack

 

[BuckSkin]

Hard drive with higher rpm's will be faster.
Jack

THANKS! That is kinda what I figured, but I wanted it confirmed by an expert.

I haven't yet actually found any prospective candidates to link to, I am just sort of getting my little ducks in a row for when I do get serious about this.

Can I put more than one machine in system specs ?

 

[Layback Bear]

As far as I know, only one system in your 'My System Specs'.
It's impossible to give exact help without complete system specs of the computer in question.
Are you referring to both drives being internal Sata connected drives?

Hard drive of 5400rpm are designed for laptops. Slower hard drives create less heat is the reason. Laptops dissipate heat poorly. For a desktop you don't want less than 7400 rpm.

GB is the amount of space allowed for data. Some call drives that hold more data a bigger drive. Actually it's physical size is the same. A hard drive that is bigger just has more disks so it holds more data.

Jack

 

[strollin]

It's not quite as cut and dry as that. If everything else was identical, then a 7200rpm drive should be faster than a 5400rpm drive. However, there are other factors that effect data transfer speed such as how much cache each drive has as well as the GB/s rating. You really need to compare each individual drive's performance ratings against each other to know for sure.

 

[Layback Bear]

strollin is correct. Of course.


That is why I suggested posting which drives you are considering. This information will help us help you.

5 Things You Need to Consider Before Buying a Hard Drive

how to compare hard drives - Google Search

Use the following guidelines when you choose a hard disk:

Choose the correct interface. ¶ ...
Buy the right capacity drive. ¶ ...
Get a model with large cache if it doesn't cost much more. ¶ ...
Pay attention to power consumption and noise level. ¶ ...
Length of warranty. ...
MTBF. ...
MTTR.

Jack

 

[BuckSkin]

The machine in question is a DELL Optiplex 780m "Mini-tower" w/Intel E8600 3.33ghz

Another question comes to mind --- as best I can determine from the DELL support site (which a couple years ago was real good and has since went over the hill), this machine supports SATA 3.0 GB/S.
Is there any benefit in using SATA 6.0 GB/S in such a machine, or is it incapable of utilizing the benefits ?

Thanks.

 

[Barman58]

There is no immediate benefit in fitting a 6GB/s on a system that has only 3GB/s SATA support, however you can always re-use a drive in your next system so I would always suggest you get the best hardware you can afford now with thought for the future, if the prices are not vastly different.

When buying drives and comparing models you should always compare detailed specs and check specs against you usage - some drives are quicker than others in reading and/or Writing a few large files, so good for Video work, others are better for lots of small files so not as good for this.

As has been stated have a look at drives in your budget in your area and post a list and if needed someone here guide guide you more

Just as an example on this system I have 3 data drives all are rated SATA 6GB two are Newer 7200 RPM 3TB and one is an older 5400 RPM 2TB. The motherboard only supports SATA 3GB so I am looking to upgrade the M/B in the next year (and probably Processor and the slowest drive), but as the prices of the last two drives were similar to the available SATA 3GB at the time of purchase my costs will be relatively low for my next upgrade (the slower drive is also used only for less often accessed items )

 

[BuckSkin]

There is no immediate benefit in fitting a 6GB/s on a system that has only 3GB/s SATA support, however you can always re-use a drive in your next system so I would always suggest you get the best hardware you can afford now with thought for the future, if the prices are not vastly different.

Thanks.
That is sound advice about buying the best one can afford.
It goes hard against my grain; lately, I often have to go the poor man's route; but then, I am a hard-core scavenger and long-time dumpster diver so I will persevere.


On another note, I swear there is a little old man in our community who is a twin to your avatar; same glasses, same whiskers, same little round head, and he lights one cigarette off another.

 

[Barman58]

All I can say about my avatar and his habits is that to me he's always looked a little more Dutch than Welsh

 

[RoasterMen]

Hard drive with higher rpm's will be faster.

It's not always the case with 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM drives.

 

[johnhoh]

You asked "which is the most governing factor in how quick a system responds"

The Most important metric is the Access Time of the boot drive. And the difference between an SSD and a spinning drive is 100:1.

I recently built a system for a guy who was tight on cash. Used a 128MB SSD for $50 as his boot drive and re-used his existing 3TB spinning drive for data.

 

[mrjimphelps]

I don't think you'll find a lot of difference in speed when you compare the various internal hard drives. I suggest that you look for a name-brand drive with a low price, and go with that.

The speed difference comes when you compare an SSD to a mechanical hard drive. An SSD is a lot faster than a mechanical hard drive.

As for your plan to get two small-capacity drives, install the OS on both, and then hold one in reserve, that is a good plan. However, you should do regular backups as well, so that you have more than one way to get back up-and-running in the event of a disaster.

Having two identical drives for the OS will allow you to test your backup, and here's how:

• Do a backup of your OS drive.
• Restore the backup to the alternate OS drive.
• Boot the computer with the alternate drive installed.

If everything works correctly, you can be confident that your backup is good, because you have actually tested it. And you can utilize your plan of swapping drives should something go wrong with the drive in the computer. This is an excellent reason to have a second identical drive for the OS.

As for your plan to keep your data on the big drive, and use it as your secondary internal drive, that too is a good plan, and here's why:

• You should back up your data regularly; however, you don't need to back up your OS very often. Therefore, you will do a regular backup (say, weekly) of the data drive, and an occasional backup (say, every other month) of the OS drive.
• If you ever need to restore or reinstall the OS (say, because your OS drive crashed), your data remains untouched, because it is kept on a separate drive.

Of course, to do backups, you'll need an external hard drive or other place to save the backups.

 

[BuckSkin]

An SSD is a lot faster than a mechanical hard drive.

Thanks so much; I really appreciate your explanation of how to test a back-up image and your whole post in general.

From what I gather, an SSD will "boot" the O/S a lot quicker; what I am still a little unclear of is will such things as photo editing programs also respond and function much quicker with an SSD ?

 

[mrjimphelps]

From what I gather, an SSD will "boot" the O/S a lot quicker; what I am still a little unclear of is will such things as photo editing programs also respond and function much quicker with an SSD ?

The computer will boot a lot faster, because during the boot process, a huge amount of data is being read from the hard drive. Since an SSD is a lot faster than a mechanical hard drive, your boot time will be a lot quicker.

However, you won't see much impact on photo editing, because the only time there is drive activity is when you are either opening the picture for editing, or saving it to the hard drive. Again, these two steps will be faster, but editing the photo won't be any faster. (If you have autosave on, it will be faster; but you won't notice, because autosave is done in the background.)

If you want to speed up the "non-disk" parts of your computing experience, you could add more memory to your computer, if it will take more memory. But you already have 8GB (according to your System Stats), and so you won't gain much if any speed there, because 8 GB is enough memory for just about every situation.

The one speed trick that no one seems to do any more is to create a RAM Disk, and then set your Windows temp folder to be on the RAM disk. This will give you a speed boost whenever Windows writes to the temp folder, sometimes a big speed boost. You can do the same for Internet Explorer (if that is your browser). Not only will this speed things up, but it has the added advantage of doing house cleaning (cleaning out the temp files) whenever you reboot the computer.

Here is information about a free RAM Disk program called DataRAM RAMDisk:
https://www.laptopmag.com/articles/faster-than-an-ssd-how-to-turn-extra-memory-into-a-ram-disk

Here is how to change the location of your Windows and IE temp folders:
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...-another/19f13330-dde1-404c-aa27-a76c0b450818

Back in the Windows 3.1 days, I was astounded at how fast a program installed on my computer when I set the Windows temp folder to be on my RAM drive.

 

[BuckSkin]

The one speed trick that no one seems to do any more is to create a RAM Disk, and then set your Windows temp folder to be on the RAM disk.

Thanks; I will look into that.

Speaking of the Temp folder, I had a peak in the Temp folder of one of our machines just last night and one of our photo editing programs, Picture Window Pro, had stashed a bunch of full size TIFF copies of some images we had been editing months ago, something like four differing versions of each image; behavior like that will soon fill up an O/S partition.

 

[mrjimphelps]

Thanks; I will look into that.

Speaking of the Temp folder, I had a peak in the Temp folder of one of our machines just last night and one of our photo editing programs, Picture Window Pro, had stashed a bunch of full size TIFF copies of some images we had been editing months ago, something like four differing versions of each image; behavior like that will soon fill up an O/S partition.

Unfortunately, a lot of software doesn't clean up after itself; therefore you collect a lot of debris over time. If your TEMP folder were on a RAM drive, every time you reboot it would recreate the drive, in effect wiping it clean with each reboot.

On the other hand, sometimes you lose a file, and the only place you can recover it from is a TEMP folder. You could have done something like that if needed, because you had full size TIFF copies of some of your images.

All in all, I prefer a clean hard drive, so I like the fact that a RAM drive is flushed clean every time you reboot.