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Hard Drive Question
Which drive would perform better?
A) Drive with 5,400 rpm but 64 MB cache
B) Drive with 7,200 rpm but 32 MB cache
Which drive would perform better?
A) Drive with 5,400 rpm but 64 MB cache
B) Drive with 7,200 rpm but 32 MB cache
It really depends on what you're doing, but I doubt you'll notice that much of a difference. If anything I'd go with the bigger cache I guess. Although if uses large files that'll fill up in like 1/10 of a second. If you really want to improve drive performance you've got to switch to the new SSD's which have readspeeds over 200Mb/s and write speeds of anywhere from 70-170 Mb/s.
What most people around here are doing is getting an 80MB Intel X-25M ($220) and then also getting a set of 1TB convential drives for data storage. You could always go for an SSD other than the Intel series and get something a bit smaller. The smallest I would go with a block for an operating system and programs is about 32GB. That won't give you much room for large programs but it will be enough space for a 64-bit installation of windows with all the normal programs, drivers, etc. You'd store all of your other stuff on the conventional drives. If you have the cash, do something like this:
Kingston 64GB SSDNow V
2 x 1.5 TB Seagate Barracuda
Total Comes to $350
Now you can boot up to two operating systems off your SSD, preferably one. All your system actions will be executed extremely fast because they're running off an SSD. I.E. Explorer, Firefox, etc. Anytime you want to use a huge program or game, you can just install and run it off one of the higher end conventional drives which will still run well they're just not as fast. You could get away with one of the larger drives, or you could just use it as a backup disk.
I actually bought a WD RE3 drive for my data drive. Paid $50 more than the Caviar Black. So I'm considering returning the RE3 for a different drive to use for my data, and spend the $50 somewhere else. I like the 5 year warranty that comes with the Caviar Black (just because I've had a few drives that fail a few months after the 3 years) but I noticed the Green has 64 MB cache but is 5,400 RPM.
The 7,200 caviar blacks are about 20-30MB/s faster than the green drives. And the power rating difference between the 2 drives is only about 4-5 watts..so really not much as far as a PC goes.
Thank you. Ordering the Caviar Black now.
The RE drives are designed to be used in a Raid setup. The Caviar Green will vary their speed from 5400-7200 RPM depending on need. I prefer the Caviar Black for their speed, size and 5 yr warranty. They do not play nice in a Raid setup. I have two in my system. One is for the OS, programs and working data. The second is for Data storage.
Jim