HDD and System Performance

I honestly think that with modern 7200 rpm drives, you're not gonna see much difference in speed if you're not benchmarking, and are just using it as a desktop drive.

 

I don't know about any of those drives you mentioned .... but I CAN tell you that upgrading from a 5400 or 4500 rpm drive to a 7200 rpm drive DOES make a noticeable difference.

 

Upgrading to a higher rotational speed will improve performance noticeably, as will upgrading to a drive with a larger cache. Beyond that, noticeable gains can be had by configuring RAID arrays. If personally recommend installing a Western Digital Raptor or two. They spin at 10000RPM and are extremely quick. I purchased two of the 36GB models when they were first released at $175 each and am very satisfied.

 

Highly unlikely the OP has a 5400 RPM drive, and certainly not a 4200 RPM drive, in a Desktop machine. 7200 has been standard on 3.5" drives since shortly after the turn of the century...

LocalGhost: Performance in Photoshop can be improved by splitting the Data, the Scratch and the System.Application functions onto separate drives (not separate partitions on the same drive). I feel that will give better perfomance than a RAID. In the G5 you are limited to 2 internal drives unless you install a G5Jam or Jive or some other bracket solution. If its a pro PS machine thought, I would seriously consider a SATA card and a 2 bay eSATA enclosure in addition to the 2 internals. If the enclosure is a hotswappable type, you can also use it for backup by having extra drives in trays.

According to StorageReview.com the best performing 7200 RPM 500 Gb is the Hitachi Deskstar; but its like cars that differ in straight line acceleration vs. cornering, a drive can be built to excel in speed in one area at the expense of another, so a lot depends on how you are using the drive (what features you are measuring)

 

I'm a big fan of the Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 drives. They have 16MB cache, which most larger drives offer and perpenicular drive recording which I think is a great feature, especially for what you want to do.

The 320s and 400s are a better price per GB than the 500s still, but now that 750s and 1TBs are the high end the 500s are coming out. I suggest newegg.com and last I saw the 500s were $199 but may have come down since then. A 320 is $85-95 and the 400s are about $120 or so, best to check the current prices for yourself. I think that line is the best reliabilty and performance and not too much of a premium. I would get those over the 7200.9s but either way you can't go wrong with Seagate. I think they have surpassed WD as the top brand. I got my 500 when they were on sale the day after thanksgiving for $150, but were $230 at the time. Another place to look is OWC but newegg usually has the best prices.

 

Is the price diff. worth it. For the video you want to do, etc. the RAW and DV you will notice a difference between 8 and 16MB caches. The 7200.9 does come in a 16MB cache. Make sure you're not getting screwed.

The ultimate decision is yours. How much performance difference and will you actively engage it enough is hard to tell. Here the 7200.10 400 runs US$120 and the 7200.10 500 is US$145. Prices are now lower than I paid for it. I can't believe 140 Euro is your best price.

 

I have a dual G5 2.7 and ended up going with two 250 WD drives, software raid striped with raid 0.

When I was first considering a fast drive setup with "fast" being primary concern, I looked into WD Raptors drives, sata raid cards, 15K rpm scsi drives and other options. I spent a lot of time researching it, too. My dream setup would have been to use three or four WD Raptors in a raid 0 configuration.

In the end I decided to to simply add another another 250 GB WD and software stripe with raid 0. I came to the conclusion because my priorities changed a bit and cost became a factor. I also needed to reload the OS because of another issue so doing raid 0 was not a huge undertaking.

Software raid can't attain the same performance as hardware raid but there is still a gain to be had. I ended up with disk performance the same as the 15K rpm scsi drive in my Dell Precision workstation. Definitely not the same as doing hardware raid but a decent gain for simply adding a drive and not having to install a sata raid card. It was definitely a budget solution that I am happy with.

One very important note: if you are thinking about doing software or hardware raid 0, a decent backup solution is a must. I use an external drive and perform a full backup every one to two weeks with incremental backups every couple days. I also do another full backup on a second external drive for more peace of mind. I still have files backed up that originated on my Graphite G3 slot loading iMac that were never archived on permanent media such as optical disks or tapes. I have only ever used external hard drives for backups and have yet to experience catastrophe. I suppose a direct lighting bolt to my desk would thrwart this!

 

I've seen people using iPod and performance USB flash drives for PS scratch with great success. So you could still RAID the drives and get yourself a 4GB "scratch" flash disk for PS.