Disk Speed

  • Thread starter Thread starter jc_va
  • Start date Start date
J

jc_va

I bought an 80g Maxtor 7200 in 2002. I want to install it as a 2nd
disk on a PC to run dual-boot linux, but I was wondering if it is fast
enough.

Have disks changed that much in 4 years to warrant buying a new HD
instead of using this one? The 80g should be plenty for what I want to
use it for.

Thanks.
 
I bought an 80g Maxtor 7200 in 2002. I want to install it as a
2nd disk on a PC to run dual-boot linux, but I was wondering if
it is fast enough.

Have disks changed that much in 4 years to warrant buying a new
HD instead of using this one? The 80g should be plenty for what
I want to use it for.
Click to expand...

For many purposes I would prefer older 4500 RPM drives, for their
reduced heat generation and power consumption. For normal use you
will probably never even notice the slowdown, especially with
gigabyte memories holding large disk caches.

--
Some informative links:
http://www.geocities.com/nnqweb/

http://www.caliburn.nl/topposting.html
http://www.netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html
 
I bought an 80g Maxtor 7200 in 2002. I want to install it as a 2nd
disk on a PC to run dual-boot linux, but I was wondering if it is fast
enough.
Click to expand...

Ok, but is running the OS _ALL_ it's going to do? That's a
fairly trivial thing, surely you want to DO something with
the system... and therein lies the details of whether
this drive is going to be a significant bottleneck to your
uses.

If you replaced it, what would you get? If a budget grade
drive, of course it won't have near the performance increase
as, say a WD Raptor or 10K+ RPM SCSI. If you have enough
data to mostly fill the drive, this too will be a more
significant slowdown for some of the data relative to a
larger capacity drive.

In general, the performance different wouldn't "usually" be
enough to reject the drive in favor of a new one, but if you
have cash to burn and are itching to speed things up as much
as possible, a newer drive is one viable way to spend the
money. I'd expect a (very rough guesstimation, since there
are so many variables) 15-25% performance increase overall.


Have disks changed that much in 4 years to warrant buying a new HD
instead of using this one? The 80g should be plenty for what I want to
use it for.
Click to expand...

Not really, but if you're working with a lot of data and
concurrent reads and writes, it could help to add the 2nd
drive anyway and have two of them in the systemm, dividing
that *simultaneous* disk I/O between the two.
 
Back
Top