Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Disks > Fastest low capacity hard drive (500gb and below)

Fastest low capacity hard drive (500gb and below)

Forum Storage : Hard Disks - Fastest low capacity hard drive (500gb and below)

Tom's Hardware: Over 1.4 million members in 6 different countries available to answer all your high-tech questions. Sign up now! Its free!

Ask the community Add a reply

Bottom Search this thread

Hey guys,

my question,

does any of you know what the fastest or few of the fastest low capacity 7200rpm hard drives are? With low capacity i mean anything under 500gb.
I tought higher density drives are faster, so single platters should be fastest, true or false?

Thanks alot

Add a reply

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't drives with multiple platters store data across all platters like RAID-0, therefore increasing speed?

------------------------------ "He is no fool who gives what he cannot keep to gain what he cannot lose" -- Jim Elliott
Reply to leo2kp

Yes they store data on multiple platters but not in a Raid-0 fashion. The drive can read or write from only one platter at a time

Ramin93 You won't notice any real world difference between a two, 3 or 4 platter drive compared to a 1 platter. the only thing you will notice is a higher cost per gig for the lower gig drive.

------------------------------ I ain't signing nothin
Reply to sturm

fastest standard type drive is the velociraptor

multiple platters does not equal raid although most SSD do use that feature

here is a comparison of drive speeds
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts [...] ks,50.html

------------------------------ E8400 : GA-EP35-DS3L : mushkin 4GB DDR2 800 : HD 2600PRO : 450W ATX12V : Windows 7
Reply to 505090

i have now a 1tb green wd drive. but its not what i expect in games, so i want to buy a faster drive. any reccomendations?

btw, western digital is definetly the best drive brand.

Reply to ramin93

Western digital 640 black.

Green drives are way slower because they are power savers hence the "green"

Black editions will net you about 92MB/s reads in HDTune use HDTune to see what your current drive is getting.

Reply to daship

is there a way to make green drives of 5200rpm perform faster, at 7200rpm?
like a frimware change or something. or will it damage the drive.

Reply to ramin93

The drive I'd go for, assuming you don't want something like a Velociraptor or SSD, is probably the Seagate 7200.12 500GB. It has a single 500GB platter, and will be faster than even the much-recommended WD 640.

------------------------------ Asus P6T deluxe
i7 965 @ 4.2GHz (200*21), 1.384V
12GB Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 CAS 7
Reply to cjl

thanks alot!
i researched and yes the Seagate 7200.12 500GBe seems to be very fast. as well the western digital 500gb black 32mb cache.
i think western digital is more reliable than seagate. but seagate bit faster.

Reply to ramin93

ANSWER:

All companies have specs listed at their websites. If you want to go by just one number, look at the average read speed.

Seek times is a factor too but doesn't affect games at all. A large amount of data is buffered into your RAM and when the game needs more it loads but the data is contiguous so average read speed is most important.

Western digital has 3 drives you should look at:
1) Velociraptor
2) 1TB Black
3) 640GB

The Velociraptor is fast but expensive. I even used up all 300GB with games. The 1TB Black is huge (actually 930GB) and slightly slower but really a great deal.

Many people have used two 1TB Black WD's in a RAID0 configuration. That gives 1860GB of space for roughly $200 and games will load about twice as fast.

SSD's are still too expensive but I plan to get one in another year then install games onto my 2nd drive (a TB hard drive) when/if space runs out (so I'll install to D-drive).

Message edited by photonboy on 06-20-2009 at 01:34:06 AM

Reply to photonboy

you can not compare avg read speeds from vendors, because they each use a different machine and different methods making a comparison between the two figures worthless.

Velociraptors are the fastest standard drive (quite expensive though), then the 7200.12 (although i refuse to use seagate), followed very closely by the caviar black (which is what I put in all my builds)

------------------------------ E8400 : GA-EP35-DS3L : mushkin 4GB DDR2 800 : HD 2600PRO : 450W ATX12V : Windows 7
Reply to 505090

Actually, sequential read speeds are pretty consistent no matter how you measure them.

------------------------------ Asus P6T deluxe
i7 965 @ 4.2GHz (200*21), 1.384V
12GB Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 CAS 7
Reply to cjl

The maximum read speed of a drive depends on where your data is located. The outer cylinders have more data per track, so at a constant 7200rpm or 10k rpm, they will transfer data faster than the inner cylinders. Currently, the fastest sata drive is the velociraptor. You can come close with the WD caviar black 1tb drive. The key is to plan on using only the fastest part of the drive. Here is a chart of the Maximum data transfer rates:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/b [...] h_sort.php

If you want to do much better, look into a couple of SSD's in raid-0. Be careful of which ssd's you look at, because many mlc drives use a controller with severe write issues. Also, the ssd is getting better daily, so it might be good to wait until the end of the year.

Reply to geofelt

Ask the community Add a reply

Tom's Hardware > Forum > Storage > Hard Disks > Fastest low capacity hard drive (500gb and below)

Go to:

Help |
Forum rules

There are 1063 identified and unidentified users. To see the list of identified users, Click here.

Page generated in 0.709 seconds

Focus On

Fastest low capacity hard drive (500gb and below)

Forum Storage : Hard Disks - Fastest low capacity hard drive (500gb and below)