Fast hard drives...

[xinjingqiao]

Most of the websites I have been reading say that there is little/no need for a hard drive faster than 7,200 rpm. In my 23 years of experience using PC's I have discovered that the common thought is usually a year or so out of date. I am wondering:

1. If I have a 10,000 rpm hard drive in a system that has 2 hard drives will it provide faster results if it is the system drive or the data drive? General question: is speed better used on the system drive with the software or on the data drive?

2. Will a 15K rpm drive produce significanlty faster results (practically speaking) than a 10K?

3. What about speed combined with RAID? Will a 10K or 15k system hard drive combined with a RAID array of 7,200 rpm provide very fast results?

[INFRATOM]

Those who say 10000 RPM is the same as 7200RPM may not have setup their computer to show the difference or the don't feel the difference for varity of reasons. The fact is the higher the RPM the faster seek time and faster HD will respond.
1- using the faster drive for your system will make your windows faster and data can store or transfer at higher rates. eg it will take less time to copy a large file or will have a better rate for capture frames.
2- This question is mostly personal perception. if this HD is serving a data base and each second counts and is multiplied to lots of man hours and cost the answer is obvious. if you like for the page to blast into the screen when you click yes faster HD is better if you don't notice the speed of the screen and system and you are not trying to optimize and would be ready to pay more for it No the difference is not that much for one person using one computer ... though some people prefer to have faster response and they feel the difference.
Raid depending for the type is for speed and security backup. Raid you need at least 2 HD to do the same thing . some types of raid are faster some not. Raid is expensive so you might as well buy faster HD for your system.
My suggestion is for personal use get those 10000 RPM for your system and 7200 RPM for your data unless money is no object. And optimize your system.

[akrako1]

I've got a 10K SCSI drive, that I use for my system drive. It seems to make everything run much faster...

Here's my general rule-of-thumb for computer upgrades...

What are you waiting for when you're being annoyed by slowness?

Is the computer:

a) sitting there thinking, not accessing hard drive? solution: faster processor, faster memory, faster motherboard

b) reading for the hard drive?

is it while reading/writing data? solution: get a faster data hard drive

is it while swapping between applications? solution: get more memory

is it while booting or launching applications? solution: get a faster system hard drive

[julitomg]

Maybe this is a dumb question; but, what would be faster/better(for an OS drive)?, a 10K ideHD @ ATA100 or a 7,200 @ATA133 or SATA (150)?

[ROF]

SATA 150. Just make sure to unplug all IDEs before you install the OS. Some people experience issues with the SATA Drive not being recognized when IDE is onboard.

[xinjingqiao]

Thanks for the wealth of information...this computer is mostly used for video editing and rendering. I drew a diagram on a piece of paper that simulated what the computer does during rendering and I started to get a picture of what goes on. Ulead is a huge program - the ones I am thinking of upgrading to are even bigger, some as big as the main part of XP. In this application the computer is constantly switching between accessing the hard drive for software and accessing the hard drive for more data, i.e. file to render. Is there any benefit gained from using 10K data drives when rendering takes 10-12 hours?

Thanks again

T