Hard Drive RPM

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:12 pm

If I went from 5200 RPM to 10400 RPM, would my hard drive be twice as fast?

Kazer0 · Post by **Kazer0** » Wed Feb 18, 2004 9:51 pm

In some ways, yes. But how much did a 10,000 RPM HD cost you? My 40gb 7200 RPM cost me $100

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Wed Feb 18, 2004 10:08 pm

I didn't buy one, I just saw one on the IBM web site.

Kazer0 · Post by **Kazer0** » Fri Feb 20, 2004 4:20 pm

Ah, well don't bother with 10k RPM. Modern drives are 7200 and run just fine.

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 20, 2004 4:46 pm

Yeah, with all the bottlenecks like parts of the motherboard, the IDE interface, and other stuff, even a 1,000,000 RPM hard drive may not help much (if they existed).

Post by **wardrich** » Fri Feb 20, 2004 5:54 pm

AFAIK, the ONLY 10K RPM HDD is Western Digital's Raptor drive, and they are EXPENSIVE.

-Richard-

Guest · Post by **Guest** » Fri Feb 20, 2004 6:01 pm

Is the Raptor IDE or SCSI?

Post by **wardrich** » Sat Feb 21, 2004 11:02 pm

I think it's IDE. The speed is hardly noticable though. You might as well stick to the standard 7500.

johpower · Post by **johpower** » Sun Feb 22, 2004 10:29 am

All things being equal, the main place you experience increase is at the read/write heads. There's alot of other sys overhead in the drive electronics and PC interface. The price goes up trying to get all these items to work well together at the higher speed. More drive cache, faster ATA, high tollerance drive motors, critical balancing, ad nausium can mean it doesn't come down to consumer level pricing for a while.

Connor (among others) had problems back in the 500-1200 mb range of drives in this vein. These drives (from most mfg's) were the worst made in the past decade (though some of it had to do with the "drive translation" ware to enable BIOS volumes above 63hds/1024cyls/16sides (512mb cap) of the era. Connor's, however, were esp bad, physically and electronically. I recall the ugly of hand swapping the drives and boards trying to get something to work for customers trying to save data. Too bad. I've had good luck with all their others.