Hard Drive Performance

[BigLu]

How much will a new hard drive boost my performance. The specs of my rig are in my signature. Along with that rig I have a 120GB, 5400rpm, 2MB cache, Western Digital WD1200AB. It seems pretty fast, but in all benchmarks it seems to be the one bottleneck beside my ram, which is about to be replaced. The hard drive is not SATA, it's like EIDE or something like that. It's slow, and has a low cache, but it seems fine. Would replacing this hard drive with a SATA 3.0GB/s 7200 16MB cache beast make much of a difference in, file moves, copying files from external devices, gaming, music management?

 

[alvino]

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822148108

Some what expensive, but it has TONS of storage, is fast, has 16mb cache and uses SATA 3.0Gb/s (also mistakenly referred as SATA II).

If you can't afford that, get any Seagate 7200.9 that's Serial ATA 150 or Serial ATA 3.0Gb/s. The 7200.9's are the ownage

 

[Tommy Boy]

oh yeah.....you'll see a boost in performance with a faster hard drive, especially replacing a 5400 rpm drive. if you really want to get serious, you could get a WD Raptor 10,000 rpm drive, or a Maxtor Diamondmax 10 7200 rpm drive with 16mb cache (just a tick slower than the raptor with 3 times the storage)