10K RPM hard drives

The Naked Whiz

Assuming you have two drives in your PC and that your PC is relatively kick-a.s.s. in general, do you think it would be worth the added expense of putting a 10K RPM drive in as your C: drive in order to speed up Windows's use of it? Music, movies, photos, website, most everything will be on the drive, but of course, Windows' page file and registry and other stuff will be on the C: drive. So do you think it is worth it? Dell wants $300 to upgrade to a 10K rpm drive, so I might even consider going to the trouble of buying a 10K drive, putting it in the C: drive, restoring the machine, and moving the C: drive to the drive. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

are you writing huge files?

i regularly open 500+meg photoshop files, and save them in iterations. have a two year old rig with 7200 rpm drives, and it writes to them fast. (raid5 config)

transferring gigs of files is no big deal.

i dunno. 300 bucks will buy an awful lot of memory these days. don't know what you are using it for, but another 300 thrown at a video card would have huge payoffs for the display, gaming, 3d applications, display-intensive stuff (transparent windows, etc. like with vists or windows7).

or 300 bucks worth of extra storage....

Celtic Wolf

Does that 300 dollars include the controller and the drive? If so, how big is the drive? Ultra SCSI?

edbro

$300 is too much of a premium for going from 7200 to 10K. I wouldn't do it.

If you have 2 separate physical hard drives then it is better to have your swap file on the other drive.

The Naked Whiz

My main concern is keeping Windows happy. I don't do much gaming, but the machine will be W7. I found a similar 10K drive at Best Buy for $200, so I'd be paying them $100 for the convenience of having the machine come ready to go, and not having to install a drive, transferring the preload, etc. But right now, my main quandry is if it would keep W7 running enough faster to justify the expense/trouble. I plan on having 6GB tri channel 1333 mhz memory, so maybe the page file isn't going to be used much? (I'm totally guessing now.) The cpu will be an Intel I7 920. I'm replacing a 5 year old machine in order to speed things up, so if I'm going to the trouble, I'm willing to put in a 10K drive it if is going to make a big difference. Again, thanks to all who answer.

Gator Bait

 
To keep it simple . . . no. Save the money. No more simple. I run two Western Digital 10k drives in a RAID 0 array so Windows sees them as one drive ,C:. Windows will break large files down into strips and alternate which drive they get stored on. Then when it needs those files it will read from one drive while seeking the data on the other, back and forth so there is little or no time wasted. I do not know how this all gets translated to a dual processor and a 64 bit OS. This array has been running for 3-4 years perfectly with out one flaw! The Western Digital 10k drives have a five year warranty as apposed to the 3 years on the slower drives. The 10k drives have to be built better to spin at that speed so they get a longer warranty (at least they did when I built this machine). They are fantastic drives but for the regular daily use I think Western Digitals 7200RPM drives are good enough. I have a 250G 7200RPM Western Digital for a and am starting to run programs off of it as the C: is getting full and I don't see any difference.
I set up the RAID 0 array for my C: for maximum data transfer rates for playing games but now wonder if it helps as everything I have put on the 7200RPM drive runs just fine.
I do like Western Digital drives, that's just my personal preference based on years of great service from them.

Gator

 

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

you lost me.
i buy my computer based on my software, and the guys put together the spec for me after dealing with the companies that develop the software. i buy what they tell me too based on a number i give them.
hahaha

i just know that i use it for heavy graphics work and modelling, and there's no great savings in time from the speed of files be written. i spent it all on processor and graphics card, where 99% of my "time" is.

rendering a file in 2 minutes instead of 8hours is such a savings, that if the time to write the file doubled, i wouldn't care.

guess i'm saying if i had an extra 100 to spend, it would always be on the processors or video card. but that is me, of course.

my frikkin thing wasstate of the art two yearsago. now i can get my wife a laptop at best buy with the same specs for 499 bucks. well. maybe not really, but it SEEMS that way!

Doug in Eggmonton

In modern windows OS you will see much better performance with more RAM. Not using the swap file being the key - 7500 to 10000 is a 33% improvement, out of Ram rather than out of the swap file is 2 or 3 orders of magnitude faster. If you are getting Windows 7 I would put at least 4GB and as much as 8GB and not worry about the 10K drive.

Doug

The Naked Whiz

Thanks to everyone who answered. I think I'll ditch the idea of the 10K drive.

Grandpas Grub

 
Is your machine 2 years old now. Geeze times flies.

GG

Humphrey Chimpden Earwicker

think so.
wonder what it would cost no. prolly 1200 bucks. hahaha
these are the guys i go to.

http://www.boxxtech.com/products/3DBOXX/4850_Overview.asp

if i knew anything, i could save myself some cash probably, but they check everything with regard to driver conflicts, and best stuff to run my software.