help with types of hard drives

[peterhoang2002]

when i started my computer today, it took 1min 29 seconds from when i pushed the power button to get to the desktop with everything at startup loaded. i decided that this was too god dam long.
so i went to frys looking for a hard drive, but there were so many types and i dont know what each is capable of. i saw SCSI, SATA, ATA, and IDE. im not sure if im leaving out any types. please tell me if i am.
im looking forward to get 1 or 2 hard drives (1 big or 2 small).
i currently have 140 left from christmas and my birthday is in a few weeks.
can anyone briefly elaborate on the different types. and what kind of setup would make the best overall performance gain. most progs load within 2 secs but my photoshop takes like 15 secs to load. i dont need ALOT of space, 40 total would suite me well. i dont mind buying controller cards if needed

heres the current setup:

20gb maxtor 7200rpm 2mb cache 12ms seek -- OS drive -- primary master
30gb maxtor 7200rpm 2mb cache 11ms seek -- data storage -- primary slave
nec dvd burner -- secondary master
dvd-rom -- secondary slave

 

[Brian Damage]

Tried defragging?

 

[Texter]

That's the lamest reason to get a new harddrive. Reinstalling windows would be more of help.
I just ordered another 80 gig IDE Maxter DiamondMax plus 9 harddrive because the other one is full. You probably don't have serial ATA, nor skoosi in your system. Right now Toshiba makes the best performing IDE harddisks by the way...they took over that department from IBM. :rolling:
A 140 something will get you at least a 120 Gig Disk btw...

 

[Texter]

That's the lamest reason to get a new harddrive. Reinstalling windows would be more of help.
I just ordered another 80 gig IDE Maxter DiamondMax plus 9 harddrive because the other one is full. You probably don't have serial ATA, nor skoosi in your system. Right now Toshiba makes the best performing IDE harddisks by the way...they took over that department from IBM. :rolling:
A 140 something will get you at least a 120 Gig Disk btw...

Make that Hitachi...too bad I can't find the test I read last week...

 

[Jammydodger]

Just format your harddrive witch wipes everything clean of it then install windows and i promise you ur comp will be like new. :thumbs:


Jammydodger

 

[RoyalEF]

Unless the new hard drive is drastically faster you may not seen an improvement. I've seen very slow startup caused by software having problems started. Reload the same software and you get the same problem back.

What IDE bus speed are you running? 66/100/133
Changing this usually rquires motherboard change. You can add a PCI card, but setup can be alittle different since it is a thrid party IDE. Some older systems wouldn't take it.

What are you current drive specs that these new ones are so much better?
How much memory do you have? If you are out of physical memory it will cause drasstic swapping on the hard disk. You disk will go crazy and look like it is taking forever to load, but in reality it is unloading/swaping to disk that is causing performance issues.

If you have a hard disk activity light on your machine watch it for the full minute and a half. If the hard disk is the bottleneck it should be very busy all the time.

You don't mention the machine is slow otherwise...just booting, which could be a load problem. run MSCONFIG and see what is loading up in startup.

 

[Asus]

Just so you know.
PATA (ATA 66/100/133) is parrallel and uses IDE cables. Consider 8mb cache WD or Maxtor drives.
SATA (ATA150) is serial and uses a thin/small red cable. There is no Master/Slave, one drive per cable. Slightly faster than the 8mb cache drives using IDE. Would need an controller card if you do not have it on your motherboard.
SCSI costs too much for desktop performance but you can look into it. You would need a controller card and you set IDs between the drives as numbers in bianary. You can connect many drives to one cable.

You can buy a controller that does RAID for PATA or SATA drives and connect them together as one drive.

But most likely, like they have said, it is the software or system configuration that needs to be cleaned up and reorganized.

 

[RandomPING]

Yea all IDE hard drives spin at the same speed(7200 RPM I think), you might get a faster MB Cache but that's about it. With a speed of loading thing, that's a ram/cpu/system configuration issue. And 15 seconds isn't even all that huge on loading photoshop. What kind of a system are you running?

 

[peterhoang2002]

ty asus for briefly explaining each type of HD.

i have reformatted and reinstalled windows 3 times already to try to get windows to load up faster but the times were still the same (+/- 2 secs). the reason i wanted to get a new HD is that i saw that WD raptors were used a lot and my friends told me they were fast: 10000rpms, 5ms seek, 8mb cache while mine is only 7200rpm 11ms seek 2mb cache.

my system is 2400+ (no OC right now)
albatron kx600 pro
512 2700 cl2.5 kingston

now, if i went and bought a 36.7mb raptor drive, would their be a noticable improvement with my applications. i may get into video editing since i now have a dvd burner

edit: i dont know what speed the drive is running at but the box said ata100

 

[RandomPING]

Not a bad system, what windows are you running?

 

[peterhoang2002]

im running xp pro. if i upgrade to the raptor hard drive, will i notice an improvement worth spending 120 bucks on? i dont mind the small space (36.7gb) because i usually store stuff on cds and i still have the 20gb and 30gb hd

 

[ThePuppetMaster]

Just buy a 120GB 7200rpm/8mb cache Western Digital Drive or a seagate one.