Maxtor, IBM, & Seagate offer 7200 RPM ATA drives.
But I'd question whether it's worth it to go 7200 over 5400, myself. According to Storage Review and others, 7200 gives around 10-15% performance boost over 5400, but usually at a noticable price premium and with significantly more noise and heat.
You might like today's update from Storage Review, quoted below.
Regards,
Dave
A few days ago, on a whim, I decided to swap out the Cheetah 4LP that I've been using in my system during the past 6 months for the Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 2500. What was the first thing I noticed? Decreased performance? 220% more available space?
No, actually, the first thing that struck me was how quiet my system was. When using the Cheetah, I also had a baycooler drive assembly in place along with two auxiliary fans running. The bare sound of my PC Power & Cooling Silencer power supply and the DiamondMax Plus is astonishingly quiet. Granted there are quieter drives, but it was heavenly :)
After a bit of use the Maxtor drive did get rather toasty (shame on me for not following my own advice!), so I decided to reconnect the two auxiliary fans. They're PCP&C Silencer fans, featuring low output but low noise. The two of them in tandem provide decent circulation in my system, keeping the DiamondMax cool enough while still keeping system noise down.
Under Win95/98, the DiamondMax Plus posts benchmark scores about 12% lower than that of the Cheetah 4LP. Believe it or not, I do sense the difference in performance both in boot time and application loads. However, this experiment has reminded me why I paid a ridiculously high amount for my power supply- I used to love quiet operation! No, I don't regularly sort 250MB Notes databases nor do I run specialized applications that require 512MB of RAM and 1.5 gigs of scratch space (I've seen these two examples quoted by some SCSI boosters as evidence of superior SCSI performance in the same threads that others used the words "normal usage"). So, in my case, if I had to choose again, I'd choose a quiet 7200rpm ATA drive rather than a noisy but fast 10Krpm SCSI subsystem. :) (submitted by Eugene at 14:34) |
