What's a good seek time, SCSI?

bump

-Phil Crosby
http://www.philisoft.com
http://www.graphics-design.com

The best I've seen for SCSI is the ~3.7 mS that the 15KRPM Seagates are giving.

"Is it as important as, say the the speed in nanoseconds on a chip of ram?"

Yeah, it is important, that is comparing apples to apples on different types of memory. Typically solid state memory (like SDRAM) is about 3 orders of magnitude faster than what todays hard disks can do. All that time you see your hard drive light blinking, divide that time by about 1000, and that would be what kind of improvement you would get if you could afford to replace your (slow) HD with (fast) solid state memory. Your analogy with the different speed GeForces is a good one.

"For instance, I have 2 of the same type of drives, same stats at least... one is 90$, 6.5ms seek time and the other is 105$, with a 4.9ms seek time. Disregarding brand name etc., would the latter drive be worth the price increase?"

I would say yes, as raw performance is usally what drives my purchase decisions. This might vary for you however. Some things to consider are: heat- the new fast drives may sometimes require special cooling as they run hot. sound- the new fast drives tend to make a lot more noise than the second and third generations of drives at a given rotational velocity. cost- the newest and fastest are always going to cost more, but I have noticed that it hasn't been nearly as bad as when the 10K RPM drives first came out. For example I can remembefr when you couldn't find 4G 10KRPM cheetahs for less than a grand.

Yikes. Thanks for the advice. I think due to price concerns I'm going to have to get the 6.5ms drives, 2 of them, because the 4.5 seconds I was looking at are more expensive than I thought, and I need two (I'll be putting these SCSI's on a raid controller). I'll be flyin then =) got a 5400 IDE drive right now.. its trash.

-Phil Crosby
http://www.philisoft.com
http://www.graphics-design.com

OOps correction.

I said
"Typically solid state memory (like SDRAM) is about 3 orders of magnitude faster than what todays hard disks can do. All that time you see your hard drive light blinking, divide that time by about 1000, and that would be what kind of improvement you would get if you could afford to replace your (slow) HD with (fast) solid state memory. "

That should read 6 orders of magnitude and then divide by 1,000,000. It actually does make a big difference. Sorry.