Well here is my current main drive (OS and programs only)

http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=83

and I've finally come to the realization that it is slower than dirt..my 'backup' drive is faster

http://www.directron.com/7l300s0.html

OK, so I'm happy with my 300gb but my 80gb (main) has got to go, what do you recommend? I'm running and AMD 3800+ x2 x64 w/2gb ram I hardly ever max out my cpu usage or my memory, so I attribute the slow speeds to my HD..any good 10k hd's out there? or are there slower ones that perform just as well....also, if I get a new drive is there a program I can use to copy everything from my slow HD to the new one, including the MBR?? any help is appreciated...thanks.

oh ya, no SCSI...just sata..dont wanna spend that much money ;)
Unless SCSI isn't as expensive as it used to be.

Also, how do I know what sata I currently have?? sata150 sata3.0gb????? very confusing....I haven't picked up my pc mag in a while :p


oh ya, heres the link to my MOBO
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K8N_Neo4-F

one more thing, on new-egg, whats difference between 'retail' and 'oem'?? All I see is price difference...looking at the WD 150gb Raptors.

I'm gonna say you have the 1.5 SATA because it *should* be marked otherwise if it wasn't 1.5

I'm quite pleased with my Seagates (that I have RAID 5'd - thats my backup array though). If you wish, I can post my specs.

When i first read the title I was thinking to myself, "How can one's HDTV be slower than molasses?" lol

Western Digital Raptor drives. Nuff said.

Western Digital Raptor drives. Nuff said.
What he said or Seagate. I upgraded my old computers HD with a Seagate and it worked pretty damned good

Western Digital Raptor drives. Nuff said.

Thats what I was looking at and they seemed pretty good...only bout 200$ too...they seem kinda old though (the ones I saw on newegg) everything else was scsi this, or sataII that.

I too would have to agree on Raptors (I dont think there are many 10k SATA).. Or better yet Raptos in Raid... You have sata1.5 it says under the IDE/SATA specs. I still need to get mine in Raid 0. But was told notron ghost doesnt work very well over 100gb. oh yea.. Nikon Norton Ghost works pretty good.

MacK

*paging CIWS*

:bump:

I have the same motherboard on my media center computer. I have 3 WD SATA drives hooked up to it. Two are in a RAID 0, striped to 500gig. The third is 80gig and has the OS on it.

I'd be one of the first to suggest Raptor's but their price puts them in a handicap. Then I read this article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/03/12/cheap_raid_ravages_wd_raptor/

It has good info and the conclusion is certainly something to think about when comparing price vs capacity. The Raptors will still be faster, in actual accessing speeds, but over all they don't offer anything else better. I'd take the 6ms access speed hit if I could hit almost a TB versus the ~300GB space with current RAID 0 Raptors.

Then I read this article and I started to real question WD's Raptors, course this thing cost more but...just read the article:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/04/17/hitachi_7k1000_terabyte_hard_drive/page6.html#data_transfer_diagram

Gotta run, enjoy!

I just bought a retail Seagate 500gig Sata2 (300) drive at Frys for 119.00 out the door. Didn't really need it, but hey 500 Gig stores a lot of movies :D

(Personal Opinion) Most folks should be satisfied with the current level of Sata2 drives, unless you're doing something like video rendering and capture direct to drive. Then something in Raptor flavor would be the way to go if you didn't care to mess with SCSI. But I would still probably not use the Raptors as the main drive and leave that to a Sata 2 drive and only capture / render on the Raptors.



http://www.ciws.info/sg500gig.jpg

Another point to consider is that RAID on almost all motherboards isn't true hardware RAID.
Compare it to the old Winmodem days.
As far the OS is concerned, it's hardware RAID, but in reality it robs the procesing power of your CPU to perform the RAID work. Not good.

I agree that Raptors are the way to go, or SCSI if you can afford them, as in either case, you need to stump up for a proper hardware RAID card.

2 or 3 Raptors or SCSI drives in a RAID 0 stripe will haul ass.

Does anyone here run RAID 5 other than myself?

Not inside my computer, I have an external RAID 5 array that hooks up via firewire 800 however.

To be realistic about this hardly anyone needs Raptors.
You can do video capture on an old style laptop hard drive (4,500rpm) as it has plenty of bandwidth to keep up.

When people complain about slow disk access it's mostly down to the fact that they have too much **** installed on there and they're now using the inner edge of the disk to write to which is the slowest part of the disk. A fresh install always seems super fast right?
Throw in the anti-virus software checking all files (not just data ones) as they open whenever you launch something and it runs like molasses.

I run my OS off my internal drive and only install the programs (and associated bloat) that I actually need. I save *all* data to my external drive.

The machine runs great and I have no trouble.

Admitedly the file system and the OS works differently (ie registry, dlls etc) as I am on a Mac not a PC so I don't have as many problems with leftover bits in the system and various other issues, but, regardless of platform the general advice is the same.

^^ normally I'd say your right and just stick with what I have...but after installing vista it's been slow..no matter what I put on it...and yes the antivirus doesn't help at all, but my business software is pretty old code and tends to access the harddrive alot...thats why I suspected the HD being my biggest flaw...I found a 150gb raptor for ~200 so I'll prolly pick that up...thanks for the suggestions..oh and thanks for the links railven, makes my decision easier. ;)

I am not too good on hard drives, but I am admin at a tech forum that should have all of the advice that you need. www.ashentech.com. I know that there are a few hard drive experts there.

I am the AMD overclocking expert ;).

one more thing, on new-egg, whats difference between 'retail' and 'oem'?? All I see is price difference...looking at the WD 150gb Raptors.

Since all the other questions are answered, I'll take the easy one.

An "OEM" package is usually just the bare drive - no rails, no cables, no mounting hardware, etc. And usually no preinstalled software. A Bare HD, in other words. And less cost for packaging.

If you know how to slip a drive into a bay, and have a couple of spare mounting screws laying around, and a cable with a free connector, you do just fine with OEM. If you don't have any mounting screws, let me know. After building PCs for about 20 years, I have approximately 1,394,599 in my toolbox, and around 500 old 40-pin HD ribbons, and 128 power cords, 12 mice, 5 CPU fans, and one copy of Norton Utilities, circa 1984... :)

Since all the other questions are answered, I'll take the easy one.

An "OEM" package is usually just the bare drive - no rails, no cables, no mounting hardware, etc. And usually no preinstalled software. A Bare HD, in other words. And less cost for packaging.

If you know how to slip a drive into a bay, and have a couple of spare mounting screws laying around, and a cable with a free connector, you do just fine with OEM. If you don't have any mounting screws, let me know. After building PCs for about 20 years, I have approximately 1,394,599 in my toolbox, and around 500 old 40-pin HD ribbons, and 128 power cords, 12 mice, 5 CPU fans, and one copy of Norton Utilities, circa 1984... :)

I'm not 100% sure on HDDs as I've never bought one OEM, but I've bought tons of OEMs opticals off Newegg.

All the OEM drivers I've bought have always come with a software CD, usually OEM version of Nero 5.x.x.x, and mounting screws. A few of them brought a digital audio out (this is mostly for DVD capable drives) for the soundcard.

That WD drive shouldn't be slow at all. Granted there are much faster out there now but a 7200 RPM drive with an 8MB buffer should be fine. I do have something for you to look at though.

I had a situation where I was feeling like my 300MB SATA 10,000 RPM drive was slow. Soon I came to the realization that my Dual Channel RAM was installed incorrectly forcing it into single channel mode. For some reason when this happens the system performance goes to crap.

If the board supports Dual Channel Memory MAKE SURE it's installed in a dual channel configuration.

I'm not 100% sure on HDDs as I've never bought one OEM, but I've bought tons of OEMs opticals off Newegg.


All the OEM drives I've purchased from Newegg have come with only the HDD wrapped in it's electrostatic bag. Which is usually fine, I already have any cables that came with the MB.

All the OEM drives I've purchased from Newegg have come with only the HDD wrapped in it's electrostatic bag. Which is usually fine, I already have any cables that came with the MB.

:yeah:

Once I got a limited warranty statement attached to the drive...:rolleyes:

I only buy full retail packaged drives. It's a pet peeve of mine.

I only buy full retail packaged drives. It's a pet peeve of mine.

An understandable one.

That WD drive shouldn't be slow at all. Granted there are much faster out there now but a 7200 RPM drive with an 8MB buffer should be fine. I do have something for you to look at though.

I had a situation where I was feeling like my 300MB SATA 10,000 RPM drive was slow. Soon I came to the realization that my Dual Channel RAM was installed incorrectly forcing it into single channel mode. For some reason when this happens the system performance goes to crap.

If the board supports Dual Channel Memory MAKE SURE it's installed in a dual channel configuration.

my memory is running in dual channel, but unfortunaly I have to run it a 333mhz due to the 4 sticks.....but I'd rather have more slightly slower memory than only 1gb of faster mem.....I might just wait 6 months and build another PC...and leave this one dedicated to media center...I checked and the dont even make 939sockets any more? WTH?? oh well, computers get upgraded way too fast....