HDD advice

I would advise you to go for a 7200rpm drive, as the price difference is negligeble against the performance increase. Your hard rive is one of the slowest parts of your system, so beef it up a little.

Maxtor are popular right now, as are Western Digital. IBM are waning in popularity for some. What transfer speed are you after? ATA66 or ATA/100?

<b><font color=blue>~ Whew! Finished...Now all I need is a Cyrix badge ~ </font color=blue> :wink: </b>

I would go for an ATA133, 7200RPM Maxtor drive. You'll love it.

Rob
Please visit <b><A HREF="http://www.ncix.com/canada/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048" target="_new">http://www.ncix.com/canada/index.cfm?affiliateid=319048...;/A></b>

Currently I have 8,4 WDC UDMA/66, 5400rpm, 512 cache, and the performance is sufficient for me. My board K7S5A doesn't have ATA/133 IDE, so I would'n be able to use advantages of 7200 Maxtor drives. But performance matters. So I want to know, now, which one is the best - Seagate Barracuda IV, WDC BB od DiaMax+. The problem is, that I can sell my old hdd at very good price now, so I'm in hurry, and still not decided which new hdd to buy. Since I have seen some tests, where some 5400 drives performed better than some 7200, I stopped thinking about 7200. What's the performance difference between 40/5400 and 40/7200 or 60/5400 and 60/7200. Seek times are the same - 9ms, so I don't know. The highest read/write buffered speed isn't interresting for me, I want to know the real use difference in performance.

Go and checkout <A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com/" target="_new">www.storagereview.com&lt;/A> under the heading of <b>"Leaderboard"</b> up on the top of the page, and I do not know how old that review is btw.
They list all the best bench tested Drives as they see it, it does look like the <A HREF="http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200102/20010226WD..." target="_new">Western Digital Caviar WD 'XXX' AB 5400 RPM ATA Drive</A> comes out to be the best in that range.
Otherwise I cannot suggest any of them for you, but have a look through that site.

Good luck and happy hunting.


If it aint broke don't fix it, just tweak it instead!

the great marketing myth around ata 133 is that it will realy imporve porformance. ata 133 was released to be able to acsses more then 137 gb that is the onl reason it is out. the perfromnce boost iseven see able when you are using them and that bust would only be for part of a seco

what is better then a 7000 rpm, a 8000 rpm delta. to cause more noise to kill your ears :smile: