CNet Article about HDD's, claims about 5400 vs 7200rpm drives, scsi vs ide, etc.

[Windsor]

http://www.cnet.com/techtrends/0-6014-8-20069949-1.html?tag=st.sr.6014-8-20069949-2.txt.6014-8-20069949-1

Is the link, and baiscally it says that there's not performance difference between 5400 and 7200 in "desktop" applications, in essence, they're saying get the cheapest drive you can find.

Whats your opinion on this?

[sbp]

:sure:

Still going to use 7200 rpm.

Wonder what Storagereview.com says about this.

[Ladogaboy]

Well, I think they have some points... but in their zeal to find faults in the logic behind some beliefs, they've made some pretty illogical points themselves...

While it is true, for basic desktop work, there will be almost no difference between 5,400 rpm and 7,200 drives, they forget that many people are power users. Also, they are testing these drives on a P4 2 GHz system and they are talking about overkill for typical desktop work? :disa: They, like everyone else who is beating this dead horse, talk about how current hard drives can't even come close to using the ATA-100 to ATA-133 bandwidth. That is fine, but I still want to see how much of that bandwidth would be used with 4 drives in RAID 0...

Also, something that I want to pick on:


Exactly how fast have hard drives gotten? Let's put things in perspective and look at a typical hard drive. One of Maxtor's low-end models, which the company sells to a personal-video-recorder manufacturer, handles up to five MPEG-2 video streams simultaneously. That's a lot of data streaming on and off the disk at once--altogether, roughly 6.5MB per second continuously. There's a clear sign that you're unlikely to hit the performance wall of any current hard drive even if you make a hobby of video or music editing.

I'll have to call bullsh1t on this... At the second highest video quality stream when I am recording avi's to my computer, it takes up about 1 gig of space per minute... if you calculate that into MB/s, that is 16 MB/s... over twice as much data as they are talking about transfering... Now I am just tinkering, and this is just a hobby, but still, I've already doubled what they expect the average computer user to be doing.

And why should I be satisfied with just recording a video stream? I built my computer to be versatile, right? Shouldn't I be able to record a video and work on another program at the same time? What if I wanted to copy and paste another file while the stream is going?

Anyway, they bring up some good points, but they haven't said anything revolutionary to me. :shrug:

[hapoo]

Ladogaboy: DV video may take that much space but video encoded in mpeg2 (used in PVR's) takes much much less space than that. At dvd quality i get less than 100 megs a minute VBR.

[Windsor]

I was thinking about Storagereview, and how they could justify their existence if there really wasn't a performance disparity between the two. It looks like CNet was a lil' overzealous in this, or at the very least, a little unbalanced in their view. I wonder if they'll cover the power users and the benefits of faster speeds and also, SCSI. I like CNet as a whole for reviews and such though, they seem pretty reliable for general overviews for products.

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by hapoo
Ladogaboy: DV video may take that much space but video encoded in mpeg2 (used in PVR's) takes much much less space than that. At dvd quality i get less than 100 megs a minute VBR.

I know, but my computer isn't powerful enough to encode and record at the same time (this is from a live feed), so I have to save the video as an uncompressed avi.

But my point was pointed more towards the fact that I am feeding around 16 MB/s to my hard drive. :hmm: But that's funny now that I think about it... SiSoft Sandra said my hard drive could only transfer 13 MB/s... :hmm:

[LegendKiller]

I am very interested in this. I am going to think of a few tests I might be able to do on various drives...such as large file copying (video files, QuakeIII wads, directories). If you guys can come up with some tests I can use them to test this little theory real time.


Heck, I can scale it down to a 4200rpm laptop drive (if I can scrounge up a laptop->desktop converter). I also have a 27gig 5400 rpm, the 'Cuda IV, the 10k WD SCSI, and the 15k 36LP2.5 cheetah.


We can see if 4200<5400<7200<10k<15k or not.


From my perspective, I call their assumptions bull****. In every day life, it DOES make a difference. The XP OS itself loads 5-600mb on startup, if you check even the fastest drives (X15) you get about 12sec's (50mbps sustained transfer rate). On a 5400 rpm drive, you will be lucky to get 20mbps, which is about 30 secs to load.

Then you figure that down to AOL, email, tons of pictures, games, and such and you are starting to get BIG figures.


I find Cnets articles usually are BS unless your talking about scanners or digicams.

Their Videocard, PC, and other reviews are crap, mainly because they use their own "cnet marks" or some BS like that.


LK

[Ladogaboy]

Originally posted by Windsor
Whats your opinion on this?

It sounds like they are telling us to all run out and buy these. (http://www.softwareandstuff.com/h.hd.SEAGATEST410800N6pk.html) :P

Yup, they're still there. :D

[Windsor]

Originally posted by LegendKiller
I am very interested in this. I am going to think of a few tests I might be able to do on various drives...such as large file copying (video files, QuakeIII wads, directories). If you guys can come up with some tests I can use them to test this little theory real time.


Heck, I can scale it down to a 4200rpm laptop drive (if I can scrounge up a laptop->desktop converter). I also have a 27gig 5400 rpm, the 'Cuda IV, the 10k WD SCSI, and the 15k 36LP2.5 cheetah.


We can see if 4200<5400<7200<10k<15k or not.


From my perspective, I call their assumptions bull****. In every day life, it DOES make a difference. The XP OS itself loads 5-600mb on startup, if you check even the fastest drives (X15) you get about 12sec's (50mbps sustained transfer rate). On a 5400 rpm drive, you will be lucky to get 20mbps, which is about 30 secs to load.

Then you figure that down to AOL, email, tons of pictures, games, and such and you are starting to get BIG figures.


I find Cnets articles usually are BS unless your talking about scanners or digicams.

Their Videocard, PC, and other reviews are crap, mainly because they use their own "cnet marks" or some BS like that.


LK


I don't read them for anything other than peripherals like digicams and scanners, monitors, pda's and stuff like that. Even then, I use them for more general reviews and try to find more in depth ones if I see something that got good rating on CNet.