Pick the HD for your needs- carefully

All techs in the know realize that a computers storage system is the bottleneck of system performance. After all, That where your operating system is installed and the OS is polled constantly during the workstations tasks. Not to mention the fact you have cache that is an extension of your memory in files on the HD's you choose

Want to make a system faster and have the money?, Go fiber channel, after that your option is a good SAS card with great bandwidth. Don't expect a fast boot if you have a RAID controller in the comp as it has to run its own bios and parity checks.

I had convinced myself that a 4x Velociraptor setup on a true raid card (Adaptec w/Intel IO processor on board) was the best. I set bench marks close to 400MB/s in RAID5 (see below) and was truly happy. But then in practical use I would be watching a movie on Netflix (streamed through the comp) and moving files off the array to my new 6 disk NAS. I looked at the loads and the drive queue was the bottleneck not the processor. I had a Cisco gigabit switch and dual gigabit links from the NAS. I verified that I was "jack and jilling" across the connects.




Anyway to make a long story short, I replaced the velociraptors with SGE32's and was surprised. The Seagates had a better IO algorithm (Native Command Queuing II) and increased performance by 20% at 50% the price for 500GB drives.

You may not hammer your drives like I do . I download, check parity, unrar, and move files to different folders. I DL at 1.2MB/s and whatch netflix HD movies now. The only hiccup is when i decompress the rared files as this is all CPU.

If you run a game machine (as I do). Using a velociraptor as the main drive makes it scream but, for your workhorse machine it might be wise to pick a good drive with loads of cache and a good prioritization.

MY .02