You're right about that. Ideally you'd want as few platters as possible. The more platters you have in your drive, the more vibration, and consequently the more noise you'll get from your drive. Platter density also affects performance. If you have a 500GiB drive with one platter, you're going to be able to access twice as much data per revolution as you could with a double platter solution, as the platters are all the same size physically, but each platter on the double platter drive only hold 250GiB, giving you half the data density. Some drives make up for this by using multiple drive heads and writing dynamically across platters in a layered array, but even then, the added vibration of having several platters in a single drive negatively affects drive performance considerably.haffeysucks wrote:
for only $20 or so more you can get a 1TB drive. i don't know too much about platters but this is my understanding. each drive has a number of "platters." each of the platters holds a certain amount. so say you have a 200 GB drive with 4 platters. i think each platter holds 50 GB. i could be wrong here so ask someone else before you take that piece of info.Im_Dooomed wrote:
I'm thinkin of upgrading to two SATA drives finally...I was thinking of just two WD's around the 200-500 gig range. But sometimes the 1TB are cheaper...Anyway, I was looking at:
THIS
or
THIS
To be honest with you guys, I could use some help here. I just kinda figure these WD's are all very similar so it doesn't really matter...What really sets HDD's apart anyway?
And if I do get two sata's, do I need to do RAID configs? Are there any good online tutorials on the benefits/installation of RAID HDD's?
Seriously, +1 for any help.
Last edited by mikkel (2009-01-14 15:58:16)