Hard Drive performance question..

[Shafra]

Hey all, I'll try to keep it simple.

I have a 2nd hard drive in my PC I use for downloading stuff via P2P. Mostly TV shows and things like that, but I do download constantly. Anyway, my main drive is Seagate 500gb and the 2nd one for the P2P is an old Maxtor 250gb, Sata 1. The drive works well for what it does but it's really loud. What I'd like to know is if I purchased another drive, like another Seagate 500gb Sata 2, would it increase download speeds at all since it seems to be constantly writing to disk? I can deal with the constant popping, but if there would be a noticeable difference in speeding up the downloads I will upgrade. I know nothing about hard drives, but saw the Seagate on sale this week and am feeling tempted

Thank you for any info.

 

[objecterror]

sata II? Do you mean the transfer rate? 3.5GB or 1.5GB? (Gigabit's I believe).

Well, if your drive is making noises or becoming loud, those are the disc's vibrating as they are written to, all of that heat you know.

Well, If your looking for a way to increase your download speeds, I'd suggest a faster internet connection. If you want faster seek times, i.e, the amount of time it takes for the hard drive to pull up information and display it or, for programs to run is your seek time.

A hard drive isn't always writing(I might be chastised later for this) it's more reading than anything. Your processor is taking information off the drive, any information directly related to programs and placing them in the ram chips you have installed. So, really, it's a lot of things before you would see a tweak in overall performance of your computer.

Upgrade your ram and buy another 500GB drive. As far as speeding up your upgrades, you would have to increase the connection speed to the internet, meaning, if your on a dsl, try the highest down rate they have, you will usually see them from the provider.

High download speeds from your service provider increase your download speed. Everything else, is based on your hardware.(lengthy reply, im sorry)

 

[saltynay]

In 5 words: no it won't increase speeds
The maxtor is probably just a bit noisy as they are a rubbish brand.

 

[kmote]

It could be that the drive is not screwed in very well or something stupid like that. You won't increase your download speeds by upgrading your HDD or RAM.
I don't know what your download speed is but lets say you get an average of 250KB/s whereas your HDD could probably sustain 55MB/s average read. Write will be less than this but you can see that there isn't really an opportunity for the HDD to slow the download.