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Solve : will a new 7200rpm HDD give me any benefit?? |
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Answer» I Currently have a 7200rpm WDC 750GB HDD, i went the SSD route but not only did I run out of room quick but it started freezing up after 2 years, so want to stick to HDD. if you already have a 7200 rpm healthy HDD, I wouldnt bother buying a new 7200rpm drive unless you need greater capacity than the one you currently have.Absolutely. One last THING. A very large HDD will show faster access than a smaller drive; other factors being equal.HuH ? ? Quote from: patio on July 04, 2014, 01:23:16 PM HuH ? ? Well might you say that. You could say for example that given two hard drives with all else being equal the drive with greater data density will outperform the one with lower data density. However, that innocent little phrase "all else being equal" robs the statement of practically all meaning. Geek said "A very large HDD will show faster access than a smaller drive; other factors being equal.". But the "other factors" (whatever they are) are highly unlikely to be "equal". Quote from: patio on July 04, 2014, 01:23:16 PM HuH ? ?Do you really want an explanation? Say you stereo 400 GB on a 2 TB drive. An you put 400 GB on a 800 GB drive. The larger drive has more free space. Real access time is lower. Quote from: Geek-9pm on July 04, 2014, 01:37:31 PM Do you really want an explanation? Are you sure about this? Quote One last thing. A very large HDD will show faster access than a smaller drive; other factors being equal. In relation to Geeks statement on increasing performance by capacity ( higher data density drive ), I have also seen performance increased by splitting a larger drive say 1 TB drive into 80GB primary & 920GB secondary partition, because while you have the higher data density of the 1TB drive platters, allocating 2 partitions to be isolated from each other forces the data to be read from a "shorter sweep of the read head". The performance gain is not like having a SSD, but those who want to optimize a HDD I have seen split large drives into multiple partitions to get a noticable performance gain. The smaller the first partition though the better the performance gain for data accessed in that first partition, although there is a LIMIT to how much gain you will get. But still, this is no wheres near as fast as a SSD, its just a speed drive optimization trick to force say the OS and swap to be within say the first 80GB and the rest of the drive to work in the slower larger sweep portion of the drive. I went through all the trouble to maximize HDD performance in the past before SSD's where available. I even ran 2 hard drives in gaming systems and had my swap / paging area on a seperate drive to that of the drive that the game and OS was running on to increase performance. But these days I go for very affordable SSD's and dont bother with HDD optimization for the small gain. More info here: http://www.pcworld.com/article/255224/how_to_partition_your_hard_drive_to_optimize_performance.html Lastly one neat trick if you have lots of RAM in your system is to create a RAM Disk. This allocates a portion of otherwise idle memory to act like a "Temporary" hard drive space. And you can upload from a HDD or SSD to this RAM Disk data that will be read and/or written to repeatedly and every time that the system accesses the RAM Disk, the data is lightning fast from RAM direct to CPU. There are pros and cons to this RAM Disk. With the primary Pro being the ultra fast speed of loading large files more than once or reading and writing multiple times which otherwise would batter a SSD or HDD. The Cons for this usually outweigh the Pros to many people. The primary con is that data in RAM is unprotected from loss in *home computers. So if you have a power outage or a computer crash the data in RAM is gone. * In costly higher end SERVERS that most people do not have, the RAM has a battery that allows for the system to pick up where it left off with the RAM holding all the data through a power outage called NVDIMM's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NVDIMM I have used the 4GB Freeware RamDisk Lite version listed at the bottom of the page at this site linked below, and it works VERY WELL for lightning fast read/writes. 4GB is pretty small for those who want to run most games that would benefit from the performance gain, however I had a script that worked with a non-commercial personal use MySQL database and while this script use to take about 5 minutes to update tables with updated info on a 500GB SATA II HDD 7200rpm, using the RAM Disk with DDR2-800Mhz made this a 38 second routine vs watching the HDD LED on solid for 5 minutes and battering the read/writes of a SSD or HDD. So the data is written to this RAM Disk at boot and then the RAM Disk gets a 1.5GB allocation from 4GB of physical RAM leaving 2.5GB for the Windows 7 64-bit system, setting up the drive letter as Z: for this space, and when the process is complete it writes the end result back to the C: drive so that the data is not lost on shutdown. If someone had say 16GB of physical RAM, and allocated say 12GB of the space, leaving 4GB for the OS and game, then for a game install to replicate to this 12GB RAM Disk, and then launch the game from that RAM Disk at say the Z: drive, that game for any read/writes it required would be lightning fast. So large games that have large files that constantly load the game content as you move around in the game for textures, map info, etc would all be as fast as a snap of your finger when paired up with a good CPU system that maximizes gaming performance. However there is always the initial load from SSD or HDD to RAM Disk and then if you want to save any data from the game that is local data, you would have to write those changes back to the SSD or HDD in the end before shutdown. http://memory.dataram.com/products-and-services/software/ramdisk [recovering disk space, attachment deleted by admin]I predict this Topic running 5 pages... And i still disagree with the notion that the amount of free space increases performance...think about it. Quote from: patio on July 04, 2014, 02:29:46 PM I predict this Topic running 5 pages...It is predicated on the idea that you don't use a lot of the space anyway. For home users it is rare to be using the whole drive frequently. For a web or LAN server it is very different. A server will use all the space for a large group of users. At home or in a small business the desktop PC is just doing one thing. Unless the user has the thing loaded with desperate background tasks the need the whole disc. Here is the scheme. The first partition is big enough for the OS and the day to day things the single user needs. The partition would be about 50 to 70 per cent used. The remainder of the very large drive is devoted to occasional backups and archive that are seldom needed. And not indexed or included in the restore. In that case there is a measurable improvement in performance. But not enough to ever replace a SSD. But it is a trick home users can use to up performance by getting a huge disc and breaking in into two or more partitions. Huge HD prices have come down, perhaps from the SSD market pressure. Somebody said: Quote SDs Make HDDs an Endangered Species.Sooner or later the HDD has to drop in price. So a hobbyist on a budget will have to decide which way to go. Invest in a good SSD or a huge cheap HDD? Quote from: Geek-9pm on July 04, 2014, 09:51:27 PM Here is the scheme. The first partition is big enough for the OS and the day to day things the single user needs. The partition would be about 50 to 70 per cent used. The remainder of the very large drive is devoted to occasional backups and archive that are seldom needed. And not indexed or included in the restore. All of this has been my scheme for some years, but I did it for convenience when making OS image backups (on another drive) rather than performance. It has been my habit to have 2 internal drives and at one time I even went as far as having the Windows page file a fixed size in its own partition on the second drive, the first partition on the disk (nearest the edge of the platters, where the linear velocity is greatest). When such a second disk started failing I got some very odd freezes and after I reverted to a system managed page file in the OS volume I didn't notice any degradation so I decided I was being hardware-*censored* (this is something that some people are prone to). All such twiddles pale into insignificance when you get an SSD. |
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