Hard Drives

[Crash]

As I will soon be ordering my new kit I wondered if the VelociRapter was worth the extra £130, or would it be better to spend an extra £130 on the graphics card. Any thoughts?

[T_O_A_D]

The Raptor will only quicken the load times.

If your running loads of memory with a slower drive, once the prog your loading is loaded, it won't matter.

Spend your money on the vid card.

[FoolTrottel]

What TOAD said!

[Crash]

What TOAD said!

Thanks, thought as much is the cache size important?

[FoolTrottel]

Bigger cache is better (faster) though, so it's also a performance thing - loading times again - Whether it's worth the extra money?

[T_O_A_D]

It helps with load times, of previously opend programs, so the bigger the cache the more it can store.

[Crash]

It helps with load times, of previously opend programs, so the bigger the cache the more it can store.

Thanks for the info. I will order a big hard drive with 64 meg cache (That is the size of the harddrive I fitted to my Amiga 1200 ) Only needed 10 meg for Workbench 3 (OS)

[Madfish]

Just as an info.

A harddrive cache doesn't really help when it comes to previously loaded data. It is meant to buffer through times where a seqential read or write is not possible due to the disc or operating system performance. For example if the harddrive has to write data onto fragmented discs or if the operating system requests data but can't read it due to queue issues or because it's stuck due to performance bottlenecks.

It also helps during the process of compressing / uncompressing.

There is a hybrid generation of drives now, these try to combine the speed of SSDs with the size of platter based drives. It's not working too great though. Basically these drives analyze what data is being accessed often and then move that data onto the SSD part of the drive. I'd recommend going for an SSD + platter drive though as the algorythms used for deciding what data goes where aren't working very well yet. This might change in the future but there are other issues that these types of harddrives have.

Rule of thumb:

• An SSD helps most where a lot of random reads / writes take place. Namely operating systems and normal workflow with software and smaller data chunks.
  
• As for physical (platter based) drives:
  A.) Fast drives, like the raptors, with high RPM (rotation per minute) like 10 or 15k are good for raid environments or when used solo for huge chunks of sequentially written or read data, for example video editing, as their random access performance is good but not nearly as good as SSDs. They have the benefit of lower cost per size though.
  B.) Slower drives, also called green drives, with low RPM around 5k are good for data storage. They do perform fairly well in sequentially read data. Especially if there is NO random access taking place
  

By the way, RAM isn't magic. I run 8 and 16Gb and I still get issues and performance problems from disc access. Especially if your pagefil is hosted on a platter based drive.