Hard Disk Speed?

[gate7cy]

Hello to everyone. I am a developer using VS 08, MySQL 5.0, Netbeans, etc. I am on the point where my developing machine needs urgently a format. It is going to be the first after 2 years, almost!!!! The current speed of my hard drive is 7200rpm (100GB). I am planning to replace that with a 320GB disk but with 5400rpm. My question is how much will affect my programming, debugging, etc the decrease in speed of the hard drive??? Thank you for all!

cheers

[baja_yu]

It wont.

[si_the_geek]

The speed difference will be for opening/saving files (and depending on disk cache etc may be negligible), so generally will have almost no effect on programming.

[gate7cy]

thank a bunch guys!!!

cheers

[mendhak]

If you play games, you may notice a difference though. If it's just a machine for development and other non-game work, then you should be OK.

[chris128]

To be honest I dont find disk speed makes much of a difference to anything. I've got a solid state hard drive in my Windows 7 machine, so disk speed should be incredibly fast compared to the average hard drive but it doesn't feel any faster opening/saving files than it did on my old hard drive really.

[ntg]

My experience is completely different. In the past, I've found that the single most important factor contributing to the speed of my PC is the performance of the hard disk drive, and I'm talking about differences that can be easily measured. Performance differences are not evident if you happen to use a small Word file or compile a small VS solution but things change very quickly if you get to the limits of physical memory (hence your computer goes to the disk) and also when working with med-to-large source code solutions. If you exclude applications that tend to not go to the disk (some games after they pre-load a lot of stuff in memory, SETI@Home, etc), the vast majority of applications makes heavy use of the disk. That also includes the operating system.

There are SSDs and there are SSDs. Because of my work, I had the opportunity to work with SSDs that do not have anything to do with what they're selling at the consumer level and I can tell you that high-end SSDs make SAS disks feel slow. I also had a 4GB iRAM (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-RAM) installed and used it for temp files and virtual memory. Without any other further tuning, the XP-based system I installed the iRAM on got considerably faster. Downside of these great toys is that they're way expensive per GB. If I had the money to burn, I'd get two of these (http://www.hyperossystems.co.uk/07042003/hardware.htm#hyperosHDIIproduct) and put them in a RAID-0 configuration.