first time builder, how do I optimize the HD?

[rustang351c]

I have a asus p5B deluxe & a seagate 7200.1, 16mb cache, perpen recording, 3.0Gb/s
In the Bios it's set to IDE by default. Should I change that to ACHI? Is there anything I can do to make it run faster?

Thx Russ

 

[jay2tall]

HD performance is sorta set, read and write speeds and what not. Personally I always partition my drives so that I have one partition for the OS and apps and another for data. This way it fragments less. The Seagate 7200.10 are pretty good drives I wouldnt worry to much. If you want high performance get a WD Raptor.

 

[aevm]

How's the Raptor compared to a Seagate SATA-2 7200.10? Is it really noisier, like some people say? I'm tempted, but I like listening to music on the PC... Thanks!

 

[rninneman]

Enable AHCI. AHCI mode enables some of the advanced features of SATA such as NCQ, RAID, and hot-swapping.

For you, the immediate benefit is Native Command Queuing (NCQ). It allows the drive to queue up to 32 commands to optimize the order they are read from the disc because of physical location on the platters.

The ICH8R controller on your board can migrate your current drive to a RAID array later if you decide you want the redundancy.

Hot-swapping will allow you to replace a failed drive or even add a new drive without even rebooting the computer!

There are probably other benefits not coming to mind right now.

If you already have Windows installed, when you change it to AHCI, Windows will probably blue-screen when you boot with a Stop 7B error. That's because it will need the proper drivers for the AHCI mode. You can obtain the latest ICH8R drivers from Intel's website. You will also need the Matrix Storage Manager if you wish to use RAID.

Ryan

 

[rninneman]

How's the Raptor compared to a Seagate SATA-2 7200.10? Is it really noisier, like some people say? I'm tempted, but I like listening to music on the PC... Thanks!

I've used Raptors in other machines. They're not that bad. Once they fully spin-up, the acoustic dampeners take effect. In a decent case, you won't notice much difference.

As far as speed, a Raptor does make an appreciable difference in system speed and responsiveness. The 7200.10s are closing the gap though if you get one of the bigger drives. What they lack in rotational speed, they make up for in areal density so similar amounts of data pass under the head each second. They still will have slower access times because of the rotational speed difference. Check Tom's hard drive charts for more details.

Ryan

 

[geofelt]

You can't do much that is meaningful. The raptor150 is faster and not noisy to me. Keep it simple. Raid, hot swapping, ncq are not helpful for the single user. Go to www.storagereview.com for a full tutorial on everything you wanted to know about hard drives.