Fastest drive - windows or programs?

[RogerR]

I just got a 32MB cache SATA HDD. Is it best used to house programs or the OS?

 

[win7clutz]

SSD Drive?

 

[RogerR]

SSD Drive?

No, just regular platters.

 

[win7clutz]

Then it doesn't matter much... Real life performance diff's between 8, 16, and 32mb cache drives are extremely nominal, just a good marketing feature.

 

[RogerR]

How that I look at it more closely, I see you are dead right. In fact even my old 80GB ATA-100 drive has almost identical read and write times.

Fortunately I didn't buy the new drive for a performance boost, and I'm actually relieved I'm not tempted to move Windows.

 

[sygnus21]

You don't say what drive you have, then you ask a generic question, then take one subjective answer as gospel.

My point - Do some research on the drive you bought and compare those specs to the one you had.

And just because it's not an SSD drive, doesn't mean there can't be differences in performance between SATA drives!

My two cents.

 

[RogerR]

You don't say what drive you have, then you ask a generic question, then take one subjective answer as gospel.

My point - Do some research on the drive you bought and compare those specs to the one you had.

And just because it's not an SSD drive, doesn't mean there can't be differences in performance between SATA drives!

Well, it was a generic question. That is, is their a benefit to running the OS vs. the application on the fastest drive?

But, upon investigation of my four specific drives I found that, as win7clutz suggested, the 500GB SATA3 drive I bought yesterday actually has pretty comparable read and seek times (per manufacturer specs) to even the oldest, an 80 gig ATA drive.

No doubt the increased cache and latest algorithms offer some benefits, but after filtering out manufacturer hype and small bottlenecks in my system, its a fair bet that the differences are negligible.

 

[sygnus21]

Bottom line is you did the research.

Later.