jinja_ninja

Hi guys,

I have been in posession of 2 Maxtor drives for a couple of years now. One is a 500GB 7H500F0 model and is the main drive, partioned into two.

I also have a 250GB drive that is purely for backup purposes. We will ignore this one

I find that the only let down on my system is the main HDD, which seems to struggle to keep up, plus it can be quite loud and annoying. I have been thinking of replacing it for a while now, but I haven't been so sure as to whether I would see a genuine performance increase compared to a Seagate 7200.11 drive with perpendicular recording.

This Maxtor I have does not have the perpendicular recording method and only 16MB onboard cache. So would a Seagate 7200.11 HDD (or equivalent) be a lot quicker when loading Windows and my much beloved TF2?

Thanks for any advice.

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Cr9ck

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822136218

The WAAKS WD 640GB Drives are really quick. Almost as fast as F1 Samsungs but quieter I believe.

If you want a performance boost make the 1st partition about 20% of your drive. This will decrease load times.

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purdueman

Yep, I went from a 400gb Samsung to the WD640gb and I noticed a fairly large speed increase. Windows loads alot quicker. On the gaming front you won't notice much of a performance difference except during load times. I highly recommend the WD 640gb.

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jinja_ninja

Well I have now ordered the WD6400AAKS after reading many good reviews, especially in terms of performance. I will be looking forward to using it

Can't wait to get rid of the old Maxtor drive, which I am not confident with in terms of reliability.

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rx7speed

I kind awonder about how much difference hard drives make with some things.

I've went from two hitachi drives that had an average of around 55-60mb/s read speed that where raided and then moved up to 4x seagate drives with an average read speed of 85-90mb/s read speed and yet windows loads just about as fast.
one drive along with the seagate vs hitachi the seagate is faster but when you compare 4 of those seagates to only two of those slow hitachi drives you would think blazing fast. I barely notice it

jinja_ninja

It does depend and performance can be negligable.

However, my current drive has had heavy usage and is starting to show signs of wear, not to mention that its roughly 2 years old now, too.

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CL3P20

Generally a larger HDD will perform slightly faster than a smaller one, when an OS is first installed. This is due primarily to the higher density of a larger capacity HDD platter. As far as cache is concerned, larger cache will be beneficial when copying large files. There are other minute differences with various HDD's which make them a bit faster than others.. not by much though.

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poohball

your 7H500F0 is a good drive. I think you will notice just slightly difference.
also 7H drive were kinda like the NS drives today from Seagate.

CrazyHeaven

About 6 months ago I brought a Seagate 1TB drive that was 7200.11. I was thinking of buying a second one to raid it but someone on here recommend that I try it first. I couldn't believe how clear the difference between the 7200.10 and 7200.11 were. Some people seem to have had problems with them but they were great for me.

The HD the OP brought was highly recommend too. It wasn't out at the time I brought my seagate.

jinja_ninja

Yeah they are "okay". We had about 20 of them at work, but about 90% of them failed within about a year!

Mine has also been heavily used for all sorts, could prove to unreliable. It also doesn't use PMR method and has god knows how many platters. Plus its LOUD!

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