Performance increase with new Hard Disk Drive? Thoughts?

[BenthamBloke]

Can anyone tell me what kind of difference a replacement for my Samsung SP0802N HDD would make to Windows XP if I were to buy a faster one? Also anyone recommend a replacement that offers speed and is reasonably priced? Cheers :-)

[isj032]

Hey benthambloke,
could you tell me in what situations you are experiencing slowdowns? And what are the specifications of your computer. Knowing this would help me help you. I did a quick search for your hdd and it operates using a 7200 speed. The fastest is about 10000 and they would be the raptors which are very overpriced for a negligible performance difference. I use seagate and go for the 7200 speeds with the 16mb caches, they are a good price/performance choice. Here is a link comparing harddrive performance:
http://tomshardware.co.uk/storage/charts.html
Tell me more about the system, it may not be a hdd issue.

[Paulst30]

I'd mention the Raptor X drive and got top drive in Custom PC tests this month. The Samsung Spin point drive came a close second too. However the Raptor drive if afforded can probably make you smile. Whats your interface IDE, SATA or SATA II??

[BenthamBloke]

Hi isj032 - the short answer is when trying to multitask; ie; TV card, Firefox & MS Money. I think I know why ... it's called Celeron 2.53ghz with 1gb memory. System seems to do a lot of HDD swapping when switching between tasks - thought in my innocence a quicker HDD would help that. I heard a faster spinning HDD on laptops helps by a big margin, was wondering if the same was true in general on desktops. I checked SiSoft Sandra and it says the cache is only 2mb. The other thing I heard was 2 HDD's - one system, one data. Any thoughts?

[BenthamBloke]

Hi Paulst30 - thanks for your input. SiSoft Sandra says ATA when I check for HDD hardware. I am slightly confused though between IDE and SATA etc ... will look into the Raptor.

[isj032]

The faster the better Bentham, on another (related) note, another gb of ram would help a lot, are you using xp mate? Many users have unnecessary tasks running in the background which can hog system resources, use the task manager to see the number of background processes, how many? Any you can turn off?
For the two hard drives you really want a raid set up to see the benefits, however having the windows page file on a separate hard drive to your windows installation supposedly speeds things up. The best bet is to go with the extra ram, having more ram allows your system to store more data at the ready so it isn't having to be pulled up from the hard drive quite so violently.

[BenthamBloke]

Yes using XP home. I always check for background progs to make sure nothing unneccessary. Will try the extra RAM - it's a lot cheaper nowadays. Thanks everyone for your input!

[Paulst30]

Coupled with adding RAM its always a good idea to add dual RAM pairs, meaning RAM sticks that are identical.

You will notice on your mother board that you probably have a 2 tone colour scheme for you ram slots, this isnt cause they like those colours its because if you use idencital RAM sticks in both identical colours you will be using the motherboards quicker set up. equally if you have 4 slots (two blue and two black for example) you can just use all identical 512Mb sticks (if afforded).

Anyway you didnt ask about RAM so i'll not go on. However, its worth remembering that the pc is only as quick as the slowest component in there as they are all connected and need each other.

[BenthamBloke]

Hi Paul, thanks for all that. I have ordered 2 x 1gb sticks of the sme type, and I only have 2 slots - so that should do the trick! Will be a week or more arriving, so will post an update!

[BenthamBloke]

GRRRR !@#~@!!! Just got the 2 x 1GB sticks - only to find out my motherboard supports max 2 x 512MB sticks !!! I think we have all learned a valuable lesson here ... Thanks for everyone's input!