A hard (drive) question

[zipdrive]

I'm building a new computer and I want to know which HD I should buy.
I've read the HD round up in THG and anandtech and only bacame more confused. to buy a barracuda? a WD? HItachy? with NCQ or without? SATA I or II?

my preferences are:

1. price
2. high performace
3. quiet operation

i don't really require a large drive. 120 or 160 GB is plenty for me right now.

recommendations?

 

[pickxx]

Wellwhat mobotherboard do you have?

Without a board that supports NCQ its useless....

Personally i dont think you can beat a 250GB SATA seagate drive for $100 at newegg. Its right at the perfect price/GB ratio and its seagate (quiet and 5yr warranty.) and SATA drives wont be any faster then IDE ones, but i have found IDE channels fill quickly and SATA cables are easier to make your case look nice.

I have this exact drive comming tomorrow...and tomorrow i will have 750GB.....and counting....

 

[fishmahn]

I'm like Pickxx - I like Seagate.

NCQ is almost worthless for normal end-user PC's (games, internet, etc.). It really becomes worthwhile in a server-like setting where lots of disk requests can queue up before the disk can service them, but normal users just don't use it that way. SATAI & II are cross-compatible, and no hard drive today can use all hte bandwidth of SATAI, so that doesn't matter either.

Mike.

 

[zipdrive]

when you say that no drive uses the SATA bandwith, is that during real-life tasks? cecause both THG and Anadtech's tests show that over 150 MB/s is reached with the newer drives

 

[pickxx]

Link me to where you saw that....my guess is they had a RAID siutation....

Some of the new drives under the perfect circumstances can do about 80-100mb/sec for like 2seconds.....but overall they are much much slower.....mostly around 40-50.


I know this because not even a RAID-0 Raptors saturate a 1050mb SATA bandwidth if i remember correctly.

 

[zipdrive]

have a look at

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2628&p=5

and

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050927/hd_round_up-33.html

 

[pickxx]

2nd link doesn't work

I was right...burst speeds....which mean a whole lot of nothing. The sustained speeds are in the 60's....thats not even close.

Burst speeds are nice....but for desktop applications you need sustained speeds. You may wait an extra second to pull up a picture thats huge....but burst is more for Servers sustained is what you want to look at.

And frankly 60's is great for 7200rpm drives....but piss poor for trying to fill a 300MB/sec bandwidth.

 

[zipdrive]

ok, reasonable enough.

so now i'm mostly looking for a good price and quiet operation...