I'd like to know, what is the difference with RPM speeds in the Hard drives? I see that the lower the RPM, the more space you can put on a hard drive... but what exactly is the better in a smaller 15K RPM or even a 10K RPM over a 7200 RPM hard drive?
RPM speeds have no direct link to hard drive capacity, although lower capacity hard drives usually sport lower speeds. Hard drive speed is simple. The faster the RPM, the faster, or shorter in this case, the load times of information off of the hard drive. 7200RPM is the norm nowadays, with cheap hard drives and laptop hard drives with 5400RPM. A kickass extreme hard drive, the Western Digital Raptor, has a 1000RPM hard drive and is one of the fastest (and most expensive) on the market, but it has limited storage. They come in 74GB and 150GB versions, and both have a greater price/GB ratio than a more standard Western Digital Caviar.
For the less than the price of a 74GB Raptor, you can probably get at least a 250GB Caviar. It all boils down to what you need the hard drive for. People who buy the Raptor are usually extreme gamers that want fast load times, or boot times. They'll buy a Raptor and put their OS on it, so it boots faster during startup. Most people don't buy Raptors, and the ones that do, don't buy them for their storage. They buy them for their load times. If you're serious about having speed, Raptors are the way to go. For general use and storage, 7400RPM should do fine. I haven't even seen a drive go beyond 1000RPM yet.
Lastly, if you're on a laptop, lower RPM's do give you an advantage. They consume less power, giving you longer battery life.
300GB Seagate Cheetah 15K.5 SCSI Ultra320 Hard Drive
Must be one hell of a hard drive. (With one hell of a price tag too )
So if I want fast boot time, I'd get the 15K, right? But I heard it's not a good idea to have 2 Hard drives running at different speeds so if I go 15K, I'll have to be stuck with buying 15K HDs if I need more space? Or is it ok for 2 HDs at different speeds?
My uncle told me it'll make the slower HD run at full power all the time and it may damage the HD if you run games on lower HD RPM than OS.
Ah, you're right on the 15K RPM drives. Seagate Cheetahs are used mostly in servers, which explains why most regular consumers don't have them. I've never seen the benchmarks on a Cheetah, much less use one, but I'll bet they could very well be faster than a Raptor and cost more.
When a hard drive runs, it always runs at it's native RPM. It doesn't run at anything else. It's definitely possible to have two drives in your computer at different speeds. I don't quite understand what you mean when you say "lower HD RPM speed than OS", but hard drives will only run at their native speed. Therefore, the slower hard drive runs at full power regardless of how fast or slow your other drives are.
I don't quite understand what your uncle said...
If you put your OS on one drive, and everything else on the other, the drive with the OS would be sitting idle once everything was booted up, unless now and then your computer needed an OS file off of the OS drive. But, in that configuration, when loading a game, the second drive will be doing all the work, since the whole game is on that drive.
Now RAID, or Redundant Array of Independent Drives, might be a little different, especially if you're striping your two drives in a RAID0 array, but that's a whole different section.
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Another words, for the simple minded, speeds and hard drives work like this.
If you have a 150gb 7200rpm HD, then your in the norm of things. Boot and processing is adequate.
Now add a 150gb, 10,000 rpm HD. And you will notice an increase of speed, less time, for it to boot and run.
Mixing the RPM speeds between 2 or more Hard Drives, do not cause a conflict with each drive. The problems you may run into, is if a program or game use both hard drives. Then it will only run as fast as your slowest link.
Just remember one thing though. Speed needs power. Make sure your power supply unit can handle it. This is an invisible vice, that nobody talks about.
RD is right, the poor old PSU sits in the back, working quietly away, if you keep adding and/or upgrading, sooner or later, just like a woman, it will turn and bite your ass. "CAVETE PRAEMONUI". now work that out !
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