SATA Revision 3 but 5900 RPM

[rishiswaz]

I am building a workstation PC and am trying to save as much as possible, My ASUS M5A88-M AM3+ AMD 880G motherboard supports SATA Revision 3 so I also want that performance factor. I am going to have 1 hard drive with 1 TB or greater because of the amounts of data I am going to be working with so that is a must. I found a 1.5TB hard drive but the speed is at 5900 RPM, will that make a significant difference? Please some sort of detail explaining it and/or any alternatives.

 

[buzznut]

I am building a workstation PC and am trying to save as much as possible, My ASUS M5A88-M AM3+ AMD 880G motherboard supports SATA Revision 3 so I also want that performance factor. I am going to have 1 hard drive with 1 TB or greater because of the amounts of data I am going to be working with so that is a must. I found a 1.5TB hard drive but the speed is at 5900 RPM, will that make a significant difference? Please some sort of detail explaining it and/or any alternatives.

The difference between a 5400 rpm drive and a 7200 is minimal. Any mechanical drive will never even come close to using the bandwidth afforded by SATA III, it is a marketing ploy designed to get users to pay more for hard drives. It will NOT be any faster than any mechanical SATA II drive. So please do not overpay for SATA III.

 

[rishiswaz]

The difference between a 5400 rpm drive and a 7200 is minimal. Any mechanical drive will never even come close to using the bandwidth afforded by SATA III, it is a marketing ploy designed to get users to pay more for hard drives. It will NOT be any faster than any mechanical SATA II drive. So please do not overpay for SATA III.

Thanks, I need SATA III because I am planning on an SSD Boot Drive later once I can afford it, but I will stick to my drive for now then. I need it for applications lik 3DS Max, Maya, CAD, etc. so will it be OK for that or should I just buy a cheaper SSD and get my hard drive when I run out of space?

 

[CaedenV]

I would stick with the HDD for now as some of those programs can have some hefty save/project files. SSDs are a matter of convenience, where as in your case the space requirement may be more of a necessity.

5900rpm drives are plenty fast, and very quiet. As you get more money I would highly suggest a RAID1 or 5 to get more throughput on these drives.

The fastest 5900/7200rpm HDDs only have a throughput of ~140-160MB/s on sequential workloads, and a sad ~50MB/s or less on nonsequential workloads, so the speed of the connector really dosn't matter as even SATA1 is fase enough for this type of throughput (though SATA3 generally means it is a newer drive which will be ever-so-slightly faster than it's SATA2 counterpart).

SSDs on the other hand will do sequential or random reads of ~150-160MB/s on uncompressable data (most program files, or well compressed media), and upwards of 320MB/s on compressable data (MP3s, Jpegs, etc), so you will want to get one when you can afford it.

 

[rishiswaz]

How many drives would I need for RAID 0+1, and is 5+0 or 1+0 better in terms of data security? The data that I will have on these drives is critical and I want to avoid drive failures so I want to avoid just RAID 0, and need some sort of parity. and if I have 2 IDE drives 500GB each would I be able to toss an adapter on those for SATA power and interface, then RAID those?

 

[rishiswaz]

Oh forgot to ask but if I am on here anyways, is 4GB of RAM good enough for a workstation? might be in the wrong category though

 

[tokencode]

You will need a minimum of 4 drives to run a RAID 10 array, and I would recommend RAID 10 over RAID 50 from a datasecurity and performance perspective, however this will come at the expense of disk space.