Wayne,

What is the speed and memory cache on the drives? Just moved up to a 5400 rpm drive on my laptop and could really tell a difference, so assume that if its a 7200 rpm drive on a home computer that its the same.

JoeA

Although a few years old now, I've got a PC I built exclusively for mastering DAT > CD. As these operations are very drive intensive (using Sound Forge), my manipulations were reduced by a factor of 6 (i.e. a 12 minute edit would take 2 minutes), when I upgraded from IDE to SCSI drives. Wayne, any idea how the IDE w/ SATA card compares to SCSI?

Usually when you get a larger drive they have a larger memory cache, so that could be what is showing a speed gain. Believe that these are 7200 with 16 meg memory.

Will have to look into these on my next upgrade!

Joe

Disk access can be a big bottle neck. Here at work, we have an online course delivery system (WebCT) and we make nightly course backups. They are essentially 3 zip files inside one more zip file. Using 10krpm scsi drives, our backups of 800 odd courses would take just under 12 hours. Changed our storage to fiber attached SAN (bi-directional 2gb/sec data transfer to "disk") and our backups - same courses, etc - now take just 4 hours.

For a second there, I thought this thread was another one of those Spam posts. (You know the ones: "Buy the new Specco Hard Drive at SLICKDEALSPAM.COM now. Free bottle of Viagra included!) I was going to move the thread off of here -- good thing I checked who started the thread first!

-Z-man.

I've always bit the price bullet and used 15k rpm (10k before) SCSI drives. Do the SATA drives perform as well or better? They're certainly cheaper...

Best thing about SATA: skinny little cables instead of those huge ribbons the size of the Mississippi.

It's almost for sure the 300s are 7200s, and most likely with 8mb, which helps too.

In inexpensive drives, a new feature to look for is "native command queueing" which lets the drive take several instructions and do them in the most efficient order. We're seeing good results with those.

Of course, I my home machine I use 3 15,000rpm disks in a RAID5 config. Opening things like Outlook take about as long as getting your finger off the mouse button. :D

I used SCSI for years then as the IDE drives became so cheap went with these and just increased my RAM to make up.

May have to look at this newer style drive as a Christmas present!

JoeA

Z, please PM the link for above. I'm in for free blue pills.......:D