Hard Drive Speed Questions OS/Data

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Kbalz

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I'm looking to build a new rig later this year. I started to peice parts of it together so I could track how prices change from now until then: and a question dawned on me.

How should I setup my hard-drives if I'm doing program development and gaming on the same machine?

I'll be running Vista Ultimate, Visual Studio 2005, and some games (a new MMO, some RTS, and a flight game).. not sure if that matters!

My thought was to have two hard drives: a smaller 36 gig for the OS and VS2005, and a larger 250+ Gig for my games and personal media (music/pics).. The interface will be SATA-II.. but it seems like there are a ton of 10k RPM SATA but not many SATA-II..

Whats the speed difference between SATA-300 7200 RPM and SATA-150 10k RPM?

I guess my question is, Is there a recommended setup for hard-drives when thinking of drive speed.. or should I just get one single massive sata-300, 7200 drive for everything.. or would Vista run better on its own 10k drive..? Do games generally need lots of IO speed ?

I don't need any non-default raid setups, I'll be doing monthly backups with DVD.

Thanks in advance and sorry if this has been posted elsewhere
 
I don't know, but I personally can't find a need for anything faster than 7200RPM, so that's what I'm going to recommend (Aside from that, I don't know about anything that isn't SATA 3GBps, so...)

OS/VS '05 (8 MB Cache, 7200 RPM, 80GB) ($44)
Gaming/Programming/Misc. (16 MB Cache, 7200 RPM, 500GB) ($140) (Free Shipping!)

At 80GB, I think you could store your programming stuff on there, and use the 500GB for your media/gaming, but it's up to you.
 
Thanks for the reply: I read a few more articles, and I don't think I'll really benifit from a 10k RPM drive, not as a single user doing what I am. I won't notice a difference from 10k vs 7200 according to the 4 articles I just read.

Yes my programming programs are not large at all, the 80 G would be fine. I also won't be programming and gaming at the same time, the only constant is the OS.

Hmm I didn't think about the cache size at all, those HDs look great for my budget too - thx!!

If anyone else has more thoughts please post -
 
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