what do you think of 5400RPM?

CyberGhost

hey everyone!

I'm thinking of buying Maxtor MaXLine II 300GB from Komplett, since I don't think any HD manufacturer will be releasing 300GB with 7200RPM anytime soon, I never owned a 5400 drive, are they really slow? I want it as a backup, i won't be using it too much or as a main drive

joePC

The drive in question is rather slow but if your only using it for back up it should be ok, TBH I'd rather buy a 200Gb 7200RPM,

Thanks joePC

Creamy Goodness

for backup it should be fine mate

uberpixie

if all you are going to do is slap mp3's and films on to it.
Who cares?

Wouldn't try play games off it though, and transfering stuff to and from the 5400rpm hd might be a bit of a pain in the ass due to the less revs.

You could just buy two 7200rpm 160gigs with 8mb caches for about 130 euro or so each, same price for the two of them as the 300 gig 5400rpm with 2mb cache!

Faster storage for the same price with a little extra space on top if you don't mind the extra hard drive :-)

CyberGhost

uberpixie, aerm... no.. cause i need 1 drive!

plus! i'm going to be using this drive with an external enclosure, so i actually think 5400rpm would MAY BE even better, because of the temperatures

Xithus

Im in the same situation myself. I decided to go for the 250Gb 7200rpm and its got 8mb buffer. I think the slower speed would drive me mad, sifting through thousands of mp3s.

CyberGhost

hey i've got one question, maxtor is ATA-133 and the enclosure supports ATA-100, is maxtor backward compatible with ATA-100? or will i have problems?

zAbbo

It`ll be a bit quieter wont it, buy 2 , for backup reasons

po0k

It's interesting how hard drive prices per gig are coming down close to that of decent CDR media, to the extent that I'm considering just building a simple NAS box full of 120Gig drives in a RAID array at some stage for storage/media box.
I really don't like using CDs or optical media.

CyberGhost

I really don't like using CDs or optical media.

yea i don't like using them too! cause in case i want to change something i'll have to rewrite all the cds! and that will take a long time!

CyberGhost

bazH, I already have second HD and I don't have space for 2 more HDs

Kali

Originally posted by CyberGhost
hey i've got one question, maxtor is ATA-133 and the enclosure supports ATA-100, is maxtor backward compatible with ATA-100? or will i have problems?

There'll be no problem with it no.

leeroybrown

The drive will work fine. The only issue you ever get with drive backward comptability is the maximum size supported by a motherboard (8.3Gb, 32Gb, 127Gb limits).

If you're storing large files on the drive the only differences you might notice are a slightly longer access delay (seek time 12.6ms v.s 9.5ms - barely noticable) and slightly slower transfer rates (I'd _guess_ a drop from ~45Mb/s to 37Mb/sec - again not a major issue).

CyberGhost

great! I can live with ATA-100's speed, Leeroy, it's a HD enclosure that connects with USB2, so i guess there will be no max size compatibility issue

leeroybrown

ATA133 isn't actually much of a speed increase anyway.

A USB2.0 attached drive will only be limited by the size of partitions your OS can handle. Shouldn't be a problem.

whosurpaddy

does anyone know if you can partition an external HDD in the same way you would a normal one in winxp?

leeroybrown

Once you initialise it onto the system both XP and 2k should allow you to partition it as you normally would in the Disk Manager.

po0k

Originally posted by CyberGhost
great! I can live with ATA-100's speed, Leeroy, it's a HD enclosure that connects with USB2, so i guess there will be no max size compatibility issue

The interface speed won't really matter as the drive won't be able to come anywhere near the capacity of UDMA100 or USB2.0

CyberGhost

but it will work right?

leeroybrown

Yeah, it should work no problem.

CyberGhost

I'm already scared of all those standards! damn it!