| 7200rpm HDD won't cut it anymore? (150mbps download) Just thinking here,
A 7200 rpm drive generally only reads/writes at about 72mb/s. If we're going to be downloading things (if we're maxing out our downstream with say, a dozen torrents at once) that's what 15-17 mb/s?
That takes a big chunk out of your HDD. If you're gaming at the same time and loading maps in Battlefield 3 or playing something like WoW that kind of sucks.
SSD's seem to be a good route to take now with these insanely high internet speeds that are becoming available. I've never bought an SSD, they've been so expensive just to load things a bit faster I never though it was worth it until I decided I'm going to get the 150/10 package.
I guess you could just buy a second hard drive and have everything you download via browser or torrent sent directly to that drive..
Thoughts? |
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| I think you've mixed up megabits per second and megabytes per second in your calculations! |
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TypeS
join:2012-12-17
London, ON
kudos:1 Reviews:
 ·TekSavvy Cable
| reply to Optional
7200rpm drives can get sequential rates above 100MB/s, and average around 40-80MB/s (Megebytes per second). Hard Drives (and now Solid State Drives) have typically been rated at MB/s, not Mb/s that internet speeds are rated at.
150Mbps (Megabits per second) is around 18.7MB/s, you're fine with a 7200rpm drive. |
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| reply to Optional
I didn't mix them up, I know 150mbps to download speeds you see isn't as easy as moving the decimal point. My 7200 rpm drives rarely see anything over 60-90 mb/s in benchmarks. I'm using two 2tb 7200rpm western digital blacks
On the 150 connection that's a good 18 mb/s chopped off, assuming you're utilizing your connection most of the time like I would be. You're hard drive isn't just sitting there doing squat, it's writing at that 18mbps you're downloading. |
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 GonePremium
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON
kudos:3 | Your WD Blacks are more than capable of handling a Gigabit connection, let alone 150Mbit/s. There's nothing more to say or to be said. It's as simple as that. |
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Reviews:
 ·voip.ms
 ·TekSavvy DSL
| reply to Optional
Going by the info on wikipedia, "a typical 7,200-rpm desktop HDD has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1,030 Mbits/sec"
1030Mbits/s converted to Megabytes/s is 125MB/s. You don't need to upgrade your HD.
»en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_disk_···fer_rate |
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| reply to Optional
Most modern 7200RPM drives can handle 60MB/s sequential write speeds on inner tracks and you would need to download at roughly 500Mbps (480Mbps + protocol overheads) to get bottlenecked by that.
Do mind your unit capitalization, it can easily get confusing and makes it unclear whether or not you actually make the distinction yourself. 1Mbps = 125KB/s using the proper legal metric prefix definition. |
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TypeS
join:2012-12-17
London, ON
kudos:1 Reviews:
·TekSavvy Cable
| reply to Optional
said by Optional:I didn't mix them up, I know 150mbps to download speeds you see isn't as easy as moving the decimal point. My 7200 rpm drives rarely see anything over 60-90 mb/s in benchmarks. I'm using two 2tb 7200rpm western digital blacks
On the 150 connection that's a good 18 mb/s chopped off, assuming you're utilizing your connection most of the time like I would be. You're hard drive isn't just sitting there doing squat, it's writing at that 18mbps you're downloading.
Got a screenshot of a benchmark actually saying your hard drive is only doing 60-90Mbs/s (Megabits per second)? Because to my knowledge all benchmarks rate at MB/s (Megabytes per second) for storage drives.
As for sustaining 150Mb/s 24/7, where are you getting that from? That's 67.5GB an hour, 1.62TB a day and 48.6TB/month, I'd be more worried about having the actual storage than the drive's speed if you really were using the full 150Mb/s all day long. Your memory and drives buffer will be used first before writing to a temporary location when browsing or streaming also. |
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GonePremium
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON
kudos:3 Reviews:
·Start Communicat..
| reply to Rastan
said by Rastan:Going by the info on wikipedia, "a typical 7,200-rpm desktop HDD has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1,030 Mbits/sec" Even that info is a little dated with 1TB/platter drives being even faster. Regardless, just about any hard drive out there is going to be more than fast enough.
Hell, even a USB 2.0 external drive will be more than capable of having something saved right to it using a 150Mbit/s net connection. |
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 InssomniakThe GlitchPremium
join:2005-04-06
Cayuga, ON
kudos:1 | reply to Optional
Yeap, Even a gigabit ethernet connection is still slower than modern day hard drives.
so you could have 6 150 meg internet installations and still not max out your hard disk speed.
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OptionsDSL Wireless Internet
»www.optionsdsl.ca |
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| reply to Optional
Even an old half dead laptop with a slower drive makes a good downloading workhorse that syncs up with your fast local NAS/LAN/Cloud. You can justify faster drives on the local LAN with lots of clients streaming from them. The WAN is not going to be a problem with disk speeds. |
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kovy
join:2009-03-26
kudos:8 | reply to Optional
If you're having issues.. just install games on a different drive... and downloads on another...
But yeah... I'm pretty sure if your WD are connected on the same PC should be faster then 80MB/s. |
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| reply to Optional
You could buy a $30 USB3.0 32GB Flash drive for your download or a temporary DLC directory for gaming. Problems solved.
I am sure that people who can pay for their 150/10 internet can easily afford a firewall or a file server to do their download. |
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 nitzguyPremium
join:2002-07-11
Sudbury, ON
·TekSavvy DSL
| reply to Inssomniak
said by Inssomniak:Yeap, Even a gigabit ethernet connection is still slower than modern day hard drives.
so you could have 6 150 meg internet installations and still not max out your hard disk speed.
I was going to say, isn't the bottleneck SATA/IDE at this point? Original SATA was 150mbit/sec transfer rate, no? I remember old IDE being UDMA 33/66 and I feel like that might be faster than a current computer but were talking Windows 95/98 days now...
So I don't think its the speed of the drive vs the speed of the interface that's the issue. |
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GonePremium
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON
kudos:3 Reviews:
·Start Communicat..
| No, original SATA was 1.5Gbit/s with 8b/10b encoding for an effective 150MB/s. That is only just starting to become a bottleneck on some new 1TB/platter drives. Those drives support 6Gbit/s SATA (effective 600MB/s) and just about any machine out there supports at least 3Gbit/s SATA so it's still a non-issue.
For what it's worth, when it comes to magnetic HDD storage the interface is never the bottleneck. SSDs are a different matter entirely. |
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Reviews:
·TekSavvy Cable
3 edits | reply to Optional
Your hard drive sequential write is probably around 90MBytes/sec or 720 Mbits/secs so in theory it can handle your 150 Mbits/sec internet connection.
Although in reality its true that if you have multiple downloads / upload running at the same time, it will slow down your hard disk to a crawl. If you use utorrent, it will manifest itself in the dreaded "disk overloaded 100% error".
But the symptoms can be alleviated by using the fastest disk for download, using a standalone download disk instead of using your system disk, and adjusting the disk cache settings in your bit torrent software, for example if you use utorrent, you can tell it to bypass the windows cache entirely and override the automatic utorrent disk cache size and specify the size manually. You can also activate the diskio coalesce option to have less frequent disk access.
Your mileage will vary., so you will have to go through a bit of trial and error before you find the correct settings for your system. |
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InssomniakThe GlitchPremium
join:2005-04-06
Cayuga, ON
kudos:1 | reply to nitzguy
said by nitzguy:said by Inssomniak:Yeap, Even a gigabit ethernet connection is still slower than modern day hard drives.
so you could have 6 150 meg internet installations and still not max out your hard disk speed.
I was going to say, isn't the bottleneck SATA/IDE at this point? Original SATA was 150mbit/sec transfer rate, no? I remember old IDE being UDMA 33/66 and I feel like that might be faster than a current computer but were talking Windows 95/98 days now... MFM and RLL interface hard drives were faster than the interface/controller/processor could process (Xt and 286 era), so interleaving was used. The hard drive platters would have made 2-3 revolutions before the PC could make the next read. ST506 type 5mb and 10mb drives, anyone old enough to remember? That was my first hard disk.
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OptionsDSL Wireless Internet
»www.optionsdsl.ca |
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TypeS
join:2012-12-17
London, ON
kudos:1 Reviews:
·TekSavvy Cable
| reply to nitzguy
said by nitzguy:I was going to say, isn't the bottleneck SATA/IDE at this point? Original SATA was 150mbit/sec transfer rate, no? I remember old IDE being UDMA 33/66 and I feel like that might be faster than a current computer but were talking Windows 95/98 days now...
So I don't think its the speed of the drive vs the speed of the interface that's the issue.
SATA version 1 was 1.5Gbit/s or 150MB/s (as Gone explained).
I think some getting confused between MB and Mb.
Megabyte/second = MB/s
Megabit/second = Mb/s
1 MB = 8 Mb |
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Reviews:
·voip.ms
| reply to Optional
said by Optional:On the 150 connection that's a good 18 mb/s chopped off, assuming you're utilizing your connection most of the time like I would be. You're hard drive isn't just sitting there doing squat, it's writing at that 18mbps you're downloading.
Ya, so you're concerned that your disk bandwidth will be about 15% - 20% occupied by downloading. Even when copying files over gigE I've never really noticed any performance degradation. May depend on system specs I guess. |
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GonePremium
join:2011-01-24
Fort Erie, ON
kudos:3 | It is unlikely the OP would ever notice when the indexing service is running in the background. Just the same, it's unlikely he'd ever notice if something was being downloaded at full clip while trying to load some game level. |
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