Yes, 15KRPM drives are faster. But they're generally loud, and they're all SCSI, so you have to buy a SCSI controller, which isn't cheap. Some boards have combination SATA/SAS (serial-attached scsi) ports, so if you have one of those, you can avoid a lot of expense.
Probably, you'd be better off with a solid-state drive. The Intel X-25s are the best available at the moment. They're quite a lot more expensive than even SCSI drives, but they're much faster for reads, and completely silent.
One of the major limitations of hard drives is I/O operations per second, IOPS. The seek time of the drive heads is a major limit here, so reading lots of small files is substantially slower than it otherwise would be. On a flash drive, there's no head, so there's no seek time -- all files are the same latency away, closely approaching zero. Things that touch tons of small files, like compiles, will run very fast indeed, even taking into account the relatively slow writes. And game load times are awesome.
Heavy writes, though, are the weak point of SSDs. If you do a lot of sustained writing, they're slower than magnetic drives. Plus, writes eventually wear them out, but you're likely to upgrade to a bigger drive long before that happens -- 8 to 10 years for normal desktop usage. Magnetic hard drives will usually fail far more quickly.
If you're trying to run a server, though, you can wear the consumer-level drives out within a year or two -- you want the much more expensive "SLC" flash drives for that, like the X25-e.
Elewis17 wrote:
I endorse any suggestion by Malor to put computer components in kitchen appliances.
Oh, and one general observation: RPM is not as important, for general use, as seek time. RPM determines how rapidly the data can flow in one the drives find a file; seek time determines how fast it can find them. (well, that plus rotational latency, waiting for the data to spin under the head, which does drop at higher RPMs). Unless you're doing heavy video or other very, very data-intensive applications, you benefit more from seek than from rotational speed. That's why the flash drives are so, so fast -- the choke point on modern drives, seek time, goes to just short of zero.
If you can't afford a flash drive, the Western Digital Velociraptors are the fastest consumer-level magnetic drives available. Their 10K RPM helps, but it's their low seek times that really matter.
This is also why the enterprise SCSI drives are faster -- they have very muscular seek motors and can get to files very quickly. Their 15K RPM drops rotational latency and increases data transfer speed. But they won't be much faster than a Velociraptor, which has a very good seek time, and they cost a lot more.
Elewis17 wrote:
I endorse any suggestion by Malor to put computer components in kitchen appliances.
The main benefit of those drives are if you are doing a lot of large scale file transfers accross a wired medium, Firewire, media sharing over Fiber or Ethernet(between two drives of similar speed mind you). If you are talking game, media performance, you might see one, but more dramatic benefit would be noticed in a faster processor, more memory on the chip, more system memory. You would see a somewhat decent increase in game load-up time as it got the date off of your hard drive, but after that it is in your memory, for the most part.
If you are doing any large scale media encoding. I mean a system for video, audio encoding, decoding, editing. And you have the processor and memory for that purpose, you will see a noticeable difference in the time it takes to save, load these files.
For system boot time, I have not seen a dramatic difference in drive speeds, over limiting boot programs. My laptop boots in 25 seconds on a 5400 RPM drive, very few log on tasks, my PC with 7200 RPM boots in 30 seconds with several boot up tasks like my sound suite, different mouse management protocols(Logitec and Razer). And I have seen the 10k, 15 k systems boot in that 20-30 second range. What will be an improvement is when more operating systems tak advantage of boot-drives like Flash drives, and RAM drives(a hard disc with embedded memory).
And that is really the moral of the story, when the software somes along to take advantage of these quicker hard disc technologies, is when you will really see a big improvement. Load Ubuntu onto a flash drive and boot off of that to see a glimpse into that future. Right now, I do not see it as worth the cost when you can get pretty speedy drives in the 1TB range for the same price as many of these super fast spinning drives.
There's a decent chance that platter rotation at that speed would generate lift and cause the case to rise up off the desk.
Or at least, it'll sound like it might.
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Depends..
Go here for great reviews of various HD's
http://www.storagereview.com/
Aint nothing new about the world order..it's been playing since the day they put George Washington on a quarter
85's face the truth you're too dumb.
do they sell non-scsi 15k drives these days?
I may be going to hell in a bucket, but at least I'm enjoyin' the ride
There wouldn't be any point in buying a 15k hard drive. They're meant for enterprise applications. They're all SCSI.
Smidgen PC - Big News About Tiny PCs
Yes, 15KRPM drives are faster. But they're generally loud, and they're all SCSI, so you have to buy a SCSI controller, which isn't cheap. Some boards have combination SATA/SAS (serial-attached scsi) ports, so if you have one of those, you can avoid a lot of expense.
Probably, you'd be better off with a solid-state drive. The Intel X-25s are the best available at the moment. They're quite a lot more expensive than even SCSI drives, but they're much faster for reads, and completely silent.
One of the major limitations of hard drives is I/O operations per second, IOPS. The seek time of the drive heads is a major limit here, so reading lots of small files is substantially slower than it otherwise would be. On a flash drive, there's no head, so there's no seek time -- all files are the same latency away, closely approaching zero. Things that touch tons of small files, like compiles, will run very fast indeed, even taking into account the relatively slow writes. And game load times are awesome.
Heavy writes, though, are the weak point of SSDs. If you do a lot of sustained writing, they're slower than magnetic drives. Plus, writes eventually wear them out, but you're likely to upgrade to a bigger drive long before that happens -- 8 to 10 years for normal desktop usage. Magnetic hard drives will usually fail far more quickly.
If you're trying to run a server, though, you can wear the consumer-level drives out within a year or two -- you want the much more expensive "SLC" flash drives for that, like the X25-e.
Elewis17 wrote:
Oh, and one general observation: RPM is not as important, for general use, as seek time. RPM determines how rapidly the data can flow in one the drives find a file; seek time determines how fast it can find them. (well, that plus rotational latency, waiting for the data to spin under the head, which does drop at higher RPMs). Unless you're doing heavy video or other very, very data-intensive applications, you benefit more from seek than from rotational speed. That's why the flash drives are so, so fast -- the choke point on modern drives, seek time, goes to just short of zero.
If you can't afford a flash drive, the Western Digital Velociraptors are the fastest consumer-level magnetic drives available. Their 10K RPM helps, but it's their low seek times that really matter.
This is also why the enterprise SCSI drives are faster -- they have very muscular seek motors and can get to files very quickly. Their 15K RPM drops rotational latency and increases data transfer speed. But they won't be much faster than a Velociraptor, which has a very good seek time, and they cost a lot more.
Elewis17 wrote:
The main benefit of those drives are if you are doing a lot of large scale file transfers accross a wired medium, Firewire, media sharing over Fiber or Ethernet(between two drives of similar speed mind you). If you are talking game, media performance, you might see one, but more dramatic benefit would be noticed in a faster processor, more memory on the chip, more system memory. You would see a somewhat decent increase in game load-up time as it got the date off of your hard drive, but after that it is in your memory, for the most part.
If you are doing any large scale media encoding. I mean a system for video, audio encoding, decoding, editing. And you have the processor and memory for that purpose, you will see a noticeable difference in the time it takes to save, load these files.
For system boot time, I have not seen a dramatic difference in drive speeds, over limiting boot programs. My laptop boots in 25 seconds on a 5400 RPM drive, very few log on tasks, my PC with 7200 RPM boots in 30 seconds with several boot up tasks like my sound suite, different mouse management protocols(Logitec and Razer). And I have seen the 10k, 15 k systems boot in that 20-30 second range. What will be an improvement is when more operating systems tak advantage of boot-drives like Flash drives, and RAM drives(a hard disc with embedded memory).
And that is really the moral of the story, when the software somes along to take advantage of these quicker hard disc technologies, is when you will really see a big improvement. Load Ubuntu onto a flash drive and boot off of that to see a glimpse into that future. Right now, I do not see it as worth the cost when you can get pretty speedy drives in the 1TB range for the same price as many of these super fast spinning drives.
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