40GB-7200RPM, 60GB 5400RPM, or 60GB 7200RPM

Ok i have come across 3 choices for my new hard drive and i'm need to ask a couple of questions. But first here's the drives i'd like to get

Seagate UATA 100, 40gb 7200RPM $77
Seagate UATA 100, 60GB 5400RPM $96
Seagate UATA 100, 60GB 7200RPM $107

First off I know 5400 is slower but is it worth the extra for the 7200? I make very little money(i'm 15) so it takes me about 3 weeks to save up enough for the price difference between the 7200 40gb and the 5400 60gb. And then another 2 for the 7200 gb. So is it worth the extra wait cause i need hd space pretty soon(i've got a 4gb and i've got only 500mb left).

Second is my choice with going Seagate a good one, i like them cause my current drive is almost 4 years old and it has absolutly no errors on the disk :). I'm just out of space. Or should i go with Maxtor, WD, or IBM(for the 60gb 7200RPM, cause its cheaper).

Thanks for any help.

seagate is okay brand i guess (heard better things about there scsi drives) make sure if you go IBM get the 60gxp NOT the 75gxp. it seem you have been ok with your 4 gig so even 40 would be large and you sohuld be fine with it. Question is will you be kicking yourself down the line that you didnt pay the extra 30 for that extra 20 gig?

i don't know. i'm thinking i've been good with 4gb since about 1/2 a year ago, so i'm figuring 10x that will be fine.

Omega, where do you work? Nevermind if it's Burger King, but if you work for a retail store that sells computer stuff, you can get an "insider" discount. Also, keep an eye on sales, trends, and rebates. After you purchase your drive, watch the prices, too. If you find it elsewhere cheaper, or it goes on sale, most retailers will refund the difference.
Be real careful at computer shows, though. You REALLY should know exactly what you want (and also how to identify an original part) at some shows.

Very important, too, is to purchase only what you need. If you make a purchase and it is what you wanted, there is no need to kick yourself later when things change. The drive you purchased will STILL be doing the exact thing that you purchased it for. Capacities and costs will change, it's a fact of life. But you can only do so much to get the absolute best deal.
ONE MORE TIP: Never purchase from a questionable dealer, even if you can save a few bucks. The difference in customer service before and after the sale will more than make up the difference.

Good luck! :D

I don't work. I'm 15. So it takes me a while to save up money :p.

Get a job! I managed to put together a very decent system while *gulp* delivering newspapers! Today I'm buying a Geforce3 Ti200.

Yeah i have a nice system besides my hd and video card.
Athlon XP 1600
ECS K7S5A
Cyberdrive 16x12x10x
256mb Samsung PC133 Ram
4gb Seagate HD(bottleneck)
TNT2 M64 PCI(bottleneck)

If it wasn't for those to i'll have a sweet system.
I'm going to get a new hard drive and then in about another 6 months i'll see how much the GF 3's have gone down and maybe pick up one. :)

Holy cow!!! I wouldn't be able to live with a 4GB HD. I could only be able to fit two games on it. Right now I am having truoble keeping room on my 16 GB hard drive. Hopefully one day I will be able to get an 80 gig HD or mabey even a 100gig HD. Man I can't wait until I turn 15. (Only one more year, YEAH!!) I am going to find a job and work my **** off to get want I want. I will have a girlfriend but if we go out she is going to pay for her meal. She can live with it I need money. I'm in debt about $200 that I owe my step dad and the only money I get is wants left of my lunch money. (Mabye about a quater or two)

And don't say go do a paper rout because I live in the countrys. There is only 11 houses in my community and it takes about 5 minutes too ride to the nearest house on my bike.

And don't say that I live in San Antonio, TX there is a population of about 1 million. Yes I live in San Antonio. The undeveloped part of San Antonio. Where there is actually trees and VERY few houses.

I just bought a Maxtor 60gb 7200 and am very pleased with it.
I also got a 20gb seagate which is good too.

SAVE UP FOR THE 60GB 72000!!!!!!!

You'll feel great when it firsts boots. Go for Maxtor, its cheaper.

You'll feel great but be careful. It depends if you want reliability. 7200rpm's get twice the amount of returns (people returning them to stores) as the 5400's. They just wear out faster. If you don't need the speed don't bother... cause it aint worth it. I'd go for the 60gb 5400rpm.

I recently bought a 40gb 5400 and I didn't have a recent enough BIOS to support it. I reckon it sounds like you'd be ok. Your mobo sounds pretty recent, just thought I'd give you a headsup.

good luck

I agree with ironik311, 7200rpm drives already require some form of cooling, be it a case fan that blows in its general direction or a real HDD fan occupying the slot above your harddrive. I have a Samsung 60gb/5400rpm, and although the response is "slower", it is nothing you'd notice without a benchmarking utility (IMO). If I were you, I'd try to go less money on HDD and more on your video card, i.e. between the 3 drives, the one that costs $77 and make sure it stays cool (because it is a hot running 7200rpm). Have you looked into buying a harddrive at Costco? They usually sell Maxtor, but their return policy is phenomenal (no questions asked). Good luck, and I feel for you, hey, I'm 38 with a full-time job and I have no money either... but my wife does, there's something wrong with this picture.

I say go for biger sizes, even if u think its too much. When I got my old comp with a 6.4GB i never thought i'd have a 10gig game directory. Also, every time a new os comes out i like to use partition magic and run two OS's until i make a full transition to the newer one. For this the extra space helps a lot. Currently im reaching the limit of a 40gig drive (only had the comp for 1.5years).

If you do go with a 5400rpm drive, make sure you load up on as much RAM as possible, and you may not notice much of a speed decrease under normal situations.

Some programs are exceptions, though. Photoshop, for example, would run better using TWO slow hard drives, than one fast one. It likes to use two or more scratch drives for temporary storage, but programs like this are rarely used to their fullest extent.

I have a 7200rpm drive, and use a temperature monitoring program. It usually stays at about 95 degrees (fehrenheit), but when defragmenting, or using a demanding app, it goes up to 120 (approx.) Anyone know what's safe?

Hey, dmoltrup. Samsung has specs out, and I assume these are applicable for most HDDs. Operational temp: max. 55 C (Non-operational temp: max. 70 C)

I sure as heck hope not!! My idling HDD temperature RIGHT NOW is 105! I have S.M.A.R.T. monitoring on, and it's never warned me about temps... I'll have to contact Maxtor tech support and ask.

No, C means Celcius. 55 C is what, like 135 Fahrenheit or around there.

he he... Celsius not farenheit! 55C is 131F

Here is a converter if you ever get stuck:
http://www.uncwil.edu/people/dixonrd/tempconv.htm

Your HDD sounds pretty normal temperature wise.

Duh.. I looked at x51out's message too fast. I thought he had down 55 celcius, and 70 fehrenheit in parentheses! :rolleyes:

First of all, get a 7200RPM drive, no question.
Second, 40GB translates to $1.93 Per/GB, 60GB translates to $1.78 per/GB, 60GB drive is better value.
Third, don't be an idiot, get a 7200RPM. Just do it.

it would be nice to see you back up your recommendation about the 7200rpm. Why do you think he should get it?

i think i'm going to go with the 60gb 5400rpm. I've heard that 7200 is only faster with larger file sizes(like 75mb+) which i don't use. I think the largest file i have on my pc(thats not part of windows) is only like 10mb.
If i do have more money at the time i buy it i will go for the 7200rpm
Heat isn't an issue for me right now, i've got a 130mm fan mounted on the side of my case(i cut a hole in the case) and its blowing on my video card, cpu, power supply, and pretty much everything else inside the case. :D
My case temperature is running at a cool 75F and my cpu is at 105F(pretty good for an Athlon XP 1600+), although that had nothing to do with my post :p.

BTW if you guys want to know what i do with this(maybe you could recommend what i should get with a better idea of what i should get). I play games(Quake 3, Max Payne, UT and similar), Make 3d Models using 3d Studio Max(i've got to get Win2k or XP, because it kills my resources), and make images and stuff with Photoshop 6.

Omega2k1 is... Mr. Mod! Check it out, cut a hole in his case. Good job! Because, the two worst enemies of a computer is the person sitting in front of the screen punching the keyboard and HEAT! So you're going 60gb5400rpm? Can't say that's a bad call, it's exactly what I have.

Yeah i guess so, i even had a case that i spray painted and made it look all special, then come to find out it was an AT case and not ATX(i didn't know there were form factors for cases at the time).

i put the fan in the case cause i had really bad heat issues and it wouldn't run for 30min without crashing cause of heat, then popped it in and it was stable for about 2 months(then i got Max Payne for Christmas and melted my thermal grease :D) but now i've got a Volcano 6 which is one good heatsink.

I gotta go with the 7200 RPM crowd here. If you have to choose, take the faster drive with less space.

Common sense tells you that a 7200 RPM drive should be roughly 1 1/2 times the speed of a 5400 RPM drive since the gating factor is how fast you can read from a spinning piece of metal. Its not like a CPU where you can get big gain by doing more per clock, it is pretty much spin speed. If you need more, Tomshardware has two articles, one on budget (5400 RPM) drives and one on performance (7200 RPM) drives. Check out the benchmarks.

The data transfer rate of a 7200 RPM drive are _significantly_ higher. This though you only get a big benefit when working with bigger files (little files transfer quick reguardless because they are little). The part that you really feel IMO is the seek time. The seek time on a 7200 RPM drive is about 2/3 that of a 5400 RPM. Seek time is how long it takes the drive to get to the data it needs to read. The speedup makes sense since its spinning 1 1/2 times as fast, a 7200 RPM takes 2/3 as long to get there. You will notice this.

Anecdotally, I put an IBM 7200RPM in my computer about 6 months ago. It is noticably faster than the IBM 5400 RPM that was in there before. It sits in the bottom drive bay (so open space under it) and below the 5400 RPM drive. I have not had any problems with heat or noise.

WD ATA100 60GB 7200 RPM. $127.00. EXCELLENT DRIVE! Don't give in to the cheaper drives. This drive is quiet and very fast.
Well worth the money.

Sweeper

Sweeper, indeed an excellent drive. But Omega2k1 is a 15year-old with no job and in serious need of at least a GeForce2GTS as well. There is only so much kissing up to DAD he can do... (no offense, omega2k1, I've been there).:cool:

hehehe... yah been there too

I thought the 5400 would be better because it would last longer... better value for his hard earned buck.

my suggestion, you want size get 120 gb drive, 5400 rpm... you want speed get the cheeta 18.3 gig 15,000 rpm.... lol look at what you need 5400 and 7200 arent hugly different..... i would go the 60 gig 5400 if i were you.... get a head start on that vid card thats a big bottel neck.

Since money is a primary issue here, I would get the 40GB Seagate. By the time you fill it up, you'll be gainfully employed and making enough to add another drive. ;)

Do you have any idea how long it takes to defrag a 40GB drive? It's pretty darned big!

I am a computer reseller/builder and have three sons so I know a little bit about the performance of Super Game Machines. That seems to be your unstated goal. Here are a few ideas that anyone on a budget can consider:

First, since you have such a fine system already (XP1600), don't shackle it with a slow HD (5400rpm). I would rather see you get a smaller but faster 10-15-20 Gig HD that is a 7200 rpm drive. If you are using a 4G now, it will be a year or more before you fill a 20 Gig. Don't forget to put the new drive on its own UDMA 100/133 IDE cable (blue connectors) adding a CD to the same IDE channel will slow it down miserably.

After a new hd you should consider getting a new motherboard ($75) with the 266a chipset which optimizes the use of the XP processors (especially for multimedia). Ideally you can find one that will use either PC133 ram or DDR 2100 ram which operates at 2 times the speed of PC133 ram. This way you can use your current ram until you can afford to buy some DDR ram later. You will see the biggest difference in speed upgrading to about 128 mb of DDR but after 256 mb of DDR, you won't see any difference in games since games are not written to us the upper ram unless you install a RAMDRIVE.

A new motherboard should also be able to support up to a 2200+ XP processor so after you upgrade the ram, hd and video card you can then upgrade your CPU to the 2200+ processor. Even if this takes a year or more, you will still be on top since you are buying quality foundation components that are upgradable. Look at this as a process of keeping up to date rather than an event of purchasing a computer.

Cnet and tomshardware sites do a good job of comparing and evaluating the components above. But when you get done with an XP system, 266a chipset, 7200 rpm drive, DDR ram and Gforce 3, you will have a system to die for.

I agree with tony_scarpelli, although at your income, or lack thereof, this might take a while. Always a good idea to build a foundation-system. Here is the deal: on my Samsung 60gb/5400rpm HDD the "average read-seek time" is 8.9ms. "ms" stands for milliseconds as we all know. I believe on a 7200rpm drive it is around 7ms or maybe 6ms. Well, average latency is 5.56ms... my point is, at these speeds, only accessing large files will drag response time. Anyways, I did earlier recommend the cheapest on your list, which happens to have been the 40gb/7200rpm. And like Tony said, why not go even smaller, i.e. 20gb/7200rpm and put the savings toward a MONSTER GeForce3Ti500 when, thanx to the "release" of the GF4's, the price should drop a notch (that is what I'm hoping so I can retire my GeForce2Pro64mb, although I'm not sure if that is a smart thing since the GF2Pro is still a pretty good card, unfortunately my new game IL-2 is choking at 35fps just flying around... that game is quite the needy-*****).

You're missing something here, Tony...he has very little money. He's 15 and must pool his allowance to get anything. He can afford the 7200RPM drive now and save by getting his choice - the 40Gb. As you stated, it will take him awhile to fill the drive. By then, he can build that hot-rod that you are recommending with the big bux he'll be making as a SysAdmin for IBM. ;)

ok you guys persuaded me to get the 40gb 7200(i guess speed is better then size :)). Hey tony, i don't really upgrade that often, consider just 4 months ago i was running a Cyrix 266mhz processor, so i don't plan on upgrading my pc after i get the hd and new video card for at least another 18 months(i'm going with moore's law), or until i can't play games anymore. So in other words, after my hd and video card, i'm not upgrading for a while.

Now as for my video card, i'm probably going to go with the Radeon 8500(it'll take me quite a while to save up for it, which by the time i have enough, the TI 500 might have gone down. If so i'm getting it). That will be probably a couple of months before i have enough for that($5 a week with ocasionally extra, like for cleaning the cars, for report card, and stuff. It also depends on how much i steal from my sister :p).

Just a quick note: I ran my converter
and came up with these temps.
95F=35C 105F=40C 120F= 49C

Conversely, 55C=131F 70C=158F

Hope this helps straighten out the temps.
AvaChava

yeah FYI people, to convert F to C its F multiplied by .625 and then subtract 32. The reverse is C multiplied by 1.8 and add 32

Sorry, when my son was 12 he got $5 per day for lunch money which he didn't use for that, plus his $20 per week allowance so I guess I was assuming that was what kids today get. Plus valentines day, birthday, easter and Christmas are all good for an extra $50 plus in gifts. It often seemed he had more expendable cash than I did.

I would recommend that you knock on neighbors doors and see if you can't get about $15-25 per lawn to mow some lawns.

Or find a reseller like myself who needs a young guy like your self to come over after school and load windows on systems, or swap out video and network cards on clients computers. It would be good for you and good for him as he could concentrate on higher value duties while you free him from the meaneal stuff.

I have worked with some young guys adn usually give them spare parts for pay

Ah come on kiddies, are ye all living in the shade? I've been running a Fuji scsi uw 68pin 2gig hard drive since the win3.XX days. It's so hot ya can not touch for a second after up for 1 hour doing just office stuff. Yep formated several times for OS changes & now running winxp pro. Sure I'm using an ATA/100 7,200 40gig as master on ide channel 1. The ide drive is IBM, runs prolly 110far for a year. Oh yea children, I don't have a jog either & live 30 miles from Fairbanks......retired age 64
BTW go with the IBM 40gig 7,200 you will be happy

sure you can get a big drive but if anything should happen like the drive failing, you've lost that much more that you have to reload as well as lost savegames and stuff. get a couple of smaller faster drives to spread out any risk. also if you're running on FAT32 with win98 or 95 you may have problems once you hit 64gig on a single drive. i've even seen a 700mhz slot A athlon system having trouble with the 32gig barrier on a 40gig drive.