I know it has excellent platter density, but rpm is slower than 7200 rpm.
How snappy (instantaneous responsiveness) is this hard drive vs. a quality 7200 rpm hard drive (I have a WD3200KS with 3 platters).
Are people happy using it as a single system hard drive with a separate media partition?
How snappy is the Western Digital 1 TB Green Power hdd?
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
It, like any other drive regardless of speed will always have snappier seeks if you create a partition that you want to use for "snappyness" at the start of the drive.
This essentially creates a very small pocket for the data to reside in so the seeks dont need to go far to find the data.
A 32GB partition for your "snappy" stuff would be a miniscule 2.97% of the drive.
All of your slow data can be dumped on a second partition which occupies the remaining 90.02% of the drive, therefore the seeks have the "potential" (note the word "potential") to be 28.13 times faster on the small partition.
This however only relates to the drives seek itself, the "rotational latency" will still have to be added to all numbers - you can do the maths on that one.
Point (1).
You will find a larger (realworld) performance gap between higher rpm drives because the one constant in my example is the rotational latency.
Point (2).
Read point 1, and note that is only accurate for drives with the same capacity and platter count.
Andy
This essentially creates a very small pocket for the data to reside in so the seeks dont need to go far to find the data.
A 32GB partition for your "snappy" stuff would be a miniscule 2.97% of the drive.
All of your slow data can be dumped on a second partition which occupies the remaining 90.02% of the drive, therefore the seeks have the "potential" (note the word "potential") to be 28.13 times faster on the small partition.
This however only relates to the drives seek itself, the "rotational latency" will still have to be added to all numbers - you can do the maths on that one.
Point (1).
You will find a larger (realworld) performance gap between higher rpm drives because the one constant in my example is the rotational latency.
Point (2).
Read point 1, and note that is only accurate for drives with the same capacity and platter count.
Andy
If you use a tool with a GUI to create the partitions, you can see where they are on the drive.
Usually in a Windows environment it looks something like this:
[---C---][---------------D-------------]
C is the first partition on the HDD and is located far to the outer edge of the drive where the transfer rate is the highest.
Note that it could also be like this:
[---D---][---------------C-------------]
"C" and "D" are just labels really. The C partition don't have to be the first one. In this second case the D partition is located far to the outer edge.
I prefer two or more HDDs myself, with a smaller and faster drive for OS/apps and one or more slower drives for storage.
Usually in a Windows environment it looks something like this:
[---C---][---------------D-------------]
C is the first partition on the HDD and is located far to the outer edge of the drive where the transfer rate is the highest.
Note that it could also be like this:
[---D---][---------------C-------------]
"C" and "D" are just labels really. The C partition don't have to be the first one. In this second case the D partition is located far to the outer edge.
I prefer two or more HDDs myself, with a smaller and faster drive for OS/apps and one or more slower drives for storage.