Hard drive speed question.?

Question

Hi.

Currently I have 2 hard drives installed on my machine. Both of them 7200rpm. 80gb used for storage and 20gb running windows xp pro sp2.
other specs
- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 2.4GHz
- MSI P6N SLI Platinum LGA 775 NVIDIA nForce
- EVGA 640-P2-N821-AR GeForce 8800GTS 640MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16

My question is if I purchase the following hard drive and and install and run windows xp on that hard drive, how much performance increase can I expect?
faster booting time?
better performance in gaming?
office applications?
image editing, etc?

Windows xp currently installed on Maxtor 20gb 7200 rpm, avg. seek time 9.7ms. 2mb buffer size

Looking to purchase this one to replace 20 gb
- Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 ST3320620AS (Perpendicular Recording Technology) 320GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s Hard Drive - OEM
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148140

thank you for your help

Answer 1

Yes! You can expect much faster times on Windows boot-ups, software installs, level loads on games, anything that requires data transfer from the hard drive, if you buy the 320GB Seagate you are looking at. Also consider creating a 20-40GB partition on the front of the disk, which you will use to store just your Windows installation and your applications/games. This will ensure that you are always installing your software on the fastest part of the media. The beginning of the media is usually about twice as fast as the end of the media for sequential reads.

Do not be fooled by the higher transfer rate of SATA compared to PATA. The SATA drive will be faster because it is smarter about executing your commands in the best possible order, and because so much more data is crammed onto the same size platter (this is known as higher areal density) as your old 20GB drive. The higher available bandwidth of the SATA interface only comes into play if you are transferring data directly from the drive's 16MB cache or if you have multiple drives on the same SATA controller.

Your Maxtor has a maximum transfer rate of about 29.8 MB/sec, while the Seagate comes in at a max of about 80.0MB/sec on the fastest part of the media. So you can see that just in terms of raw numbers, the drive is dramatically faster. Plus, the other bonus is that it should also run much quieter.

I would definitely consider that upgrade!

Answer 2

I agree that you need a bigger HDD, but only because the existing ones are so small. It may marginally speed up booting. If you want faster gaming, install as much DDR2 RAM as your motherboard will allow. That is where speed comes from, as your PC will not be wasting time swapping data to and from the HDD.

Answer 3

The rate of transfer is much greater with the Sata drive @ 3 Gb/s

The drive you have now is between 33 and 133 Mb/s

RAID has pros and cons...

Answer 4

RAID formatting is the best bet with many hard drives running at once. RAID allows certain tasks or apps to be divided among the hard drives. Example: on RAID you can have a third of XP on each drive. When you start up, theoretically each hard drive has only third the full load. All apps can be then divided up giving you three times the performance in everything in terms of moving information not processing it.