Hard disk drive advice

I've been trying to improve my Logos performance, and done quite well so far. A new graphics card, and some very profitable overclocking has given me the following Windows Experience Index:

So you can see I'd really like to improve disk performance. The problem is that the drive I have at the moment is a 7,200rpm Seagate Barracuda, albeit a 10th generation model. I don't think that's a bad drive, and I don't know how to improve on it. I'm not averse to getting a smallish disk that I just keep for applications that need high speed, but I'm not sure I can afford SSD, and anyway I'm concerned that the random read/writes that Logos does most often wouldn't get best value out of a drive like that.

So, the question is: can anyone recommend a really quick drive that isn't too expensive (<$100 ideally). I know there's other factors at play, but if you have a primary hard disk of with a Windows performance index of 6.5+ or above, I'd be very interested.

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Comments

Ben

Actually, random reads are where SSD totally whomp on traditional drives. A random-reading disk has to move the head all over in unpredictable ways, and that slows it much more than in a sequential read.

That said, SSDs are still out of my budget too [:'(]

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124260#Comment_124260

random reads are where SSD totally whomp on traditional drives

Strangely, that's by no means true of all SSD's.

Ron

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124268#Comment_124268

A couple of points:

1) I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that all mechanical hard drives are capped at 5.9 on the WEI. I had two 10K RPM drives in my system before getting my SSD and they both rated 5.9 as well.

2) Have you looked into Intel's "value" SSD? It is small (40GB), but I think it is close to the $100 mark price-wise.

3) I didn't look at the article you linked, but I wouldn't trust anything written by Tom's Hardware as far as I could throw it. I used to be a big fan of theirs years and years ago, but they have long ceased to be a source of reliable information. IMHO, AnandTech is a far more reliable site for reviews and information. If you want a good site for storage specifically, storagereview.com has always been a top-notch site.

EDIT - After taking a quick peek at that article, they are only comparing SSDs to each other...how are you drawing the conclusion from that that some SSDs don't thoroughly beat up on mechanical drives when it comes to random reads? I'm almost 100% positive that even the slowest of the current SSDs still blows away the fastest of the mechanical drives when it comes to random reads.

Kevin Becker

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124275#Comment_124275

1) I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that all mechanical hard drives are capped at 5.9 on the WEI. I had two 10K RPM drives in my system before getting my SSD and they both rated 5.9 as well.

If memory serves, this is true of Vista and not Win 7.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124275#Comment_124275

I'm almost 100% positive that even the slowest of the current SSDs still blows away the fastest of the mechanical drives when it comes to random reads.

Thanks for the links to the other sites. I'll look them up.

There a large number of review articles around showing a very wide-range of performance for SSDs, and the slowest SSDs are sometimes slower than the fastest mechanical drives. Here's another recent review comparing SSDs to Velociraptors: http://techreport.com/articles.x/18757/5

The 40Gb Intel drive is quite a bit slower than the larger capacity models. Besides, unfortunately whilst my Logos installation is 'only' 27Gb, it peaks above 40Gb during re-indexing.

Mark Barnes

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124275#Comment_124275

AnandTech is a far more reliable site for reviews and information. If you want a good site for storage specifically, storagereview.com has always been a top-notch site

Thanks Ron. The reviews there confirmed my thinking to go for the 160Gb Velociraptor.

Don

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124336#Comment_124336

The Intel SSDA2M160G2GC is pretty good.

JimTowler

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124344#Comment_124344

[6.9 Graphic]

Don,

Sounds a nice machine with some power to burn. How well does the Logos Application perform? Any issues with speed, reindexes, searches ...?

( My laptop is a snail by those numbers. I think its in the 2.x levels )

EDIT: OK - I just took a look and got a shock. This laptop claims disk=5.4, cpu=5.4, ram=5.9 and its almost 2 years old, and was at the cheaper end of things, without being a toy. Maybe I should start being nicer to it ...

Don

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/124355#Comment_124355

I've got a reasonably large library, but my new laptop does pretty well. My old Pentium 4 desktop sometimes needed all night to index. This goes pretty fast, usually in tens of minutes rather than hours. The index files are large. One is over 7 GB.

Library size

Search time

Index size

Jim Dunne

Hi Mark,

I added an AData 64-GB SSD to my system a couple of weeks ago, and moved Logos on to it. It's made a significant speed improvement for me. I paid $179 for the AData, less a $20 mail-in rebate.

My "the" search results were 19,043,690 results in 16.15 seconds.

A search for "redemption" in the NASB 95 returned 31 results in 0.19 seconds.

Blessings,

Jim D.