[MurrayW]

One more question from a new member. Should I spend the extra money to get a 7200RPM vs. a 5400RPM drive? I plan to use the HiPix card to time shift and record/playback digital TV. Will I notice any performance differences?


Again, thanks for any help and advice.


MurrayW

 

[smc_r8dr]

IMHO, it is really worth the money. IBM has some great drives with great deals. Make sure you get an ATA100 drive at 7200 RPM. If your computer does not support it, you can get a PCI Promise card for about $35 that will support ATA100. It also will do a hardware mirror of 2 drives which will speed up your reads.


But I use my PC for a lot more than just HT.

 

[RTK]

i think the extra performance of a 7200rpm drive is the way to go.


im biased to the seagate baracuda IV series drive because they are essentially silent which makes them perfect for htpc usage. the ibm drives are also great worth considering.


rick

 

[PVR]

Remember in the HTPC world, quiet is often

very important. 7200rpm drives spin faster

than 5400rpm drives and are often more noisy.


The data xfer rate depends on the rpms and

also the bit density... So some 5400rpm

drives can actually have more performance

than 7200rpm drives with less bit density.


I use dedicated HiPix drives just to store

HiPix recordings - and those drives are

5400rpm drives because they are less expensive

and more quiet. For my system/boot disks

I use 7200rpm disks since boot time is important.


A 5400rpm drive running in old UDMA/33 mode is

fast enought to handle recording HDTV with a

HiPix. When recording and playback the

datarate is locked at 19.2Mbit/sec (ATSC

standard) so having a higher performance drive

is not going to make your movie record or

playback any better.

 

[dlarsen]

Hell, My old 4X DVD drive reading a CDR is fast enough for ATSC transport stream files. I didn't think the HiPix could do PVR style timeshifting?


Dave

 

[Pootle]

I still go for 5400 rpm drives, they are quite fast enuff for everthing I do, DDR ram made more difference to boot time than anything else I have done for years.


If you really want performance, go for stripped discs, this will make 5400 rpm discs got EXTREMELY fast.


See Toms harware on storage for the detailed info.

 

[blipszyc]

I agree with Pootle. You'll get much better performance if you stripe the drives rather than mirror. If you don't already have a motherboard, make sure you get one that supports RAID or get an IDE RAID card and get a couple 5400 RPM drives for striping.(RAID 0)

 

[analog8]

Speed doesn't always equal noise - my 1 year old 5400 rpm Maxtor is WAY louder than my brand new 7200 rpm Seagate Barracuda IV.

 

[work permit]

I generally like toms reviews, but for storage you'll find better, more insightful reviews at Storage Review


Consensus at the moment: Western Digital WD1000BB takes the performance nod;


Avoid the IBM 75GXP...some people question its reliability. The newer 60 gig drives should be no problem.


For simple time shift/recording you really aren't limited by disk performance.

 

[CO1]

No disrespect but what the hell is wrong with some of you recommending 5400 RPM drives because they are quieter! The db difference is shag all. Nothing worth worrying about let alone recommending someone go for less performance. If you can hear your hard drive TURN UP YOUR SPEAKERS or sell your old junk and get a new one! Really there is very little difference in noise with the new drives but a noticeable difference in performance. Do some searches on the net to find out how to set up RAID 0. Very simple but for what you want to do it will yield great results.

 

[RTK]

there is no quieter (5400 or 7200rpm) drive than the seagate baracuda IV series which imho is the only drive worthy of consideration for an htpc if acoustics are an issue. it is also 7200rpm / ata-100.


speed and silence... its a nice combination

 

[MurrayW]

Thanks to all for posts. I never realized that you could stripe a drive and make it faster.

 

[luvmytivo]

Quote:

Originally posted by MurrayW Thanks to all for posts. I never realized that you could stripe a drive and make it faster.

Technically, you can't. You can stripe a pair of drives though. The trawback is that you double your chance of disasterous failure (lose 1 drive, lose all the data) and halve your MTBF. This will give you better performance under some circumstances, but IMHO for an HTPC there's no way it'd be worth it. Hell, the HD in my HTPC sleeps 99% of the time anyway. I'm not trying to be completely negative - RAID 0 has it's place, it's just not in an appliance like an HTPC. Save yourself some money and spend $50 on an extra halg-gig of RAM...

 

[ROBERT HUNZEKER]

Murray,


My HTPC is setup with an ancient 4gig boot drive and a Maxtor ATA100 40Gig drive for Hipix capture, tried capturing to the 4gig and it worked fine. ATSC does not put much of a strain on IDS drives, just buy whatever you can get a good deal on and figure about 9gig per hour of storage. Since there is a class action suit against IBM for the 75GXP drives I would stay away from them.


Bob H.

 

[smc_r8dr]

1) You can stripe 2 or more drives in Windows NT/2k/XP without a additional card. Only spanning is supported in 95/98/ME


2) Note that striped sets perform much better than spanned sets. Spanning simply increases the size of a logical partition, while striping really speeds up the reads by logically spreading the data across the drives. So, when you do a read from a set with three drives, you get 3X the data in the same time as if you read from one. Writes the same way.


3) If you lose any drive in a stripped or spanned set, you lose ALL DATA. Hardware or software mirror (RAID 1) creates redundency so if you lose one drive, the other simply takes over.


4) RAID 0 (Striped set) is faster on the writes than RAID 1 (Mirror) but they are about the same on the reads (FAST!) unless you stripe more than 2 drives.. in which RAID 0 is faster even yet.


5) We have over 50 IBM 20GB ATA100 7200 drives in use without issue. Western Digitals have been giving us issues. Seagate you never know. For a year it will be great, and the next you will experience a lot of failures. I have been using seagates for 15 years and right now IBM is best value IMO.


6) If you get a ATA33 5400 rpm drive and start multitasking with more than 1 thread accessing the drive.. IT WILL CRAWL. ATA100 bandwith with the seek times associated with a 7200 will allow you to record one while watching another. I personally think the 7200 drives last longer as well. (Newer technology)


7) If you really want speed, go Ultra SCSI 3 15K rpm on RAID 0.


8) If you install a spanned set, make sure your swap file is on that set. You will see a major overall performance increase.


Good Luck!