Is my harddrive my bottleneck?

luckydriver

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Aug 6, 2010
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prior to my m/b frying, i had a x2 4400 processor with 2 gigs of ddr2. I'm in a situation where i have to get a CPU and a motherboard immediately and i've begun researching what's new. I see all the new AMD phenoms etc and then i began wondering about all my other hardware.

so is it true that even with the latest and greatest m/b and cpu that my old IDE drives are holding me back speedwise (bootup is especially painful even though i'm utilizing 'startup delayer' to hold back unnecessary programs)? If that's true, then ill just stick with the cheaper and 'not so fast' cpus since it wont really benefit me and i have no plans, no money, to upgrade my hard drives. i'm not a heavy gamer and dont need the latest on my old xp machine anyway :)
 

gtvr

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The hard drive is a bottleneck for things that require disk reads or writes. It has response times that are 100s of times or more slower than processor or memory response.

That being said, there's plenty in your computer that depends on the processor or video card. Depending what you do day to day, you may still see some benefit from spending a little extra cash. Doesn't sound like there's any point in going nuts though.
 

luckydriver

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wow i hadnt priced hard drives in years, been using 2 80 gig W/D for a long time with no issues except being constantly full. amazing that 500 gigs is cheaper than my 80 gigs were lol. I thought drives were well over 100 bucks but for 40 or 50, i may do it. I'm assuming 133mb is a tad slower than 3 gig sata ? :) seems like a worthwhile upgrade
 

luckydriver

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update: for anyone contemplating a change from IDE to SATA, just do it.

I ran my new machine for a few days with my old IDE (using a new m4a77 asus board, x4 2.9 chip, 2 gigs 1066 ram) and it still was taking 10 minutes to boot up, and that's even with my startup delayer delaying a lot of programs

then over the weekend i installed the new WD 640 sata 3 gig and wow. The acronis installer took less than an hour total and bootup times ( i consider when i get click on and start windows explorer being substantially booted) are anywhere from 2 to a high of 4 minutes. That's impressive

with as cheap as the drives are (sale 54 plus free shipping for me), i almost think it's a better upgrade to get a new drive vs any other component if you are worried about bootup times :)

of course now with my other stuff i'm getting fast program access too