question about hard drives

[imported_Reck]

I've always kinda wondered, is it bad for a hard drive to be doing multiple things at once? Like downloading mulitple things...multiple reading and writing. Or playing games while downloading...would that be be for your hard drive?

 

[hithesh123]

A hard drive never does multiple things at once. At any given time instant its only doing one task (either reading or writing).

If you are playing a game, downloading stuff and also playing MP3s, the hard drive is working continuously. No harm in doing this unless you are doing it 24-7.

 

[saltedeggman]

well i always thought that you don't load too much from harddrive during games (maybe except starting/changing staged)........

 

[halfadder]

Modern hard drives can handle pretty intense exercising. A good example of this are DVRs, like the Tivo. If you watch a TV program that is timeshifted or previously recorded, while it's recording another show, the poor drive has to write down about a second of incoming video data to disk, then read about a second of video data for the show you're watching, then write down another second of incoming video, then read out another second.... over and over and over. If you have a dual tuner DVR, it's even worse. Gizmo has two write down two streams of video to disk while it reads out another.

 

[AJeightFive]

I'll post my question here, instead of creating my own thread that will get a single reply and then dissapear for eternity serving only the purpose of cluttering up Anandtech's databases. I'm upgrading my system...

Currently I have 2 IDE Hard drive's. One 40 (system disk) and one 80 (apps, games, documents disk) GB. Would it be worth replacing these with a single 80 or 120GB SATA drive? Will the additional bandwidth provided by the SATA connection outweigh the benefits of having a seperate system disk? Thanks,

AJ

 

[saltedeggman]

SATA I doesn't provide additional bandwidth over ATA

Why spend more and replace 120gig with 120gig ??

 

[AJeightFive]

So how does one take advantage of the advertised 150MB/sec bandwidth of SATA drives, vs the ~50MB/sec I get with my current drives in Sandra's benchmarks? Also, my current drives have a 2MB cache, will having an 8MB cache provide noticeable differences. My apologies if all this is explained in an article somewhere, I never seen to be able to find exactly what I'm looking for .

Thanks again,
AJ

 

[saltedeggman]

Originally posted by: AJeightFive
So how does one take advantage of the advertised 150MB/sec bandwidth of SATA drives, vs the ~50MB/sec I get with my current drives in Sandra's benchmarks? Also, my current drives have a 2MB cache, will having an 8MB cache provide noticeable differences. My apologies if all this is explained in an article somewhere, I never seen to be able to find exactly what I'm looking for .

Thanks again,
AJ

150mb/sec is only theoretical yield....

2mb and 8mb cache, you will noitce a difference....

why don't you get one of 16mb cache drives from maxtor, these drive can keep up with raptor in some benchmark

 

[Thegonagle]

Originally posted by: Reck
I've always kinda wondered, is it bad for a hard drive to be doing multiple things at once? Like downloading mulitple things...multiple reading and writing. Or playing games while downloading...would that be be for your hard drive?

Not really. Sure, you're giving the head mechanism a bigger workout, but any good hard drive will take it in stride; after all, that's what hard drives are built to do.

One bad thing that will happen if you're downloading multiple files at once is excessive fragmentation. You may want set the task scheduler to run a daily defrag. (Use the command line version with task scheduler, and schedule it for a time when you normally won't be gaming.) If allowed to run daily, it usually takes only a few seconds each time.

Originally posted by: AJeightFive
So how does one take advantage of the advertised 150MB/sec bandwidth of SATA drives, vs the ~50MB/sec I get with my current drives in Sandra's benchmarks? Also, my current drives have a 2MB cache, will having an 8MB cache provide noticeable differences. My apologies if all this is explained in an article somewhere, I never seen to be able to find exactly what I'm looking for .

Thanks again,
AJ

That's all you'll get from any 120 GB drive due to platter speed and data density, which in your drives (going by your benchmark numbers) is most likely 40 GB per side, or 80 GB per platter. (The 40 uses 1x one-sided platter, and the 80 uses 1x two-sided platter; a modern 120 GB uses 1x two-sided platter and 1x one-sided platter.)

The 150 MB/s number is the maximum transfer speed of the interface, not the drive mechanism itself. The only time your hard drive can max out the interface is when it's using its relatively miniscule data cache. You won't see very much real world difference between 150 MB/s SATA and 133 MB/s PATA, or even 100 MB/s PATA. A larger cache can help a little bit, but not much. Empty (or fill) that data cache, and the laws of physics apply; the sustained transfer speed when not using the cache--and the benchmark number you'll see--is limited by the physical characteristics of the hard drive mechanism.