Comparitive Hard Drive Specs

[kjfrey1701]

I'm using v.10+ and just felt great about winning an eBay auction for a 250GB drive to use for my projects. The thing that caught my eye was that it had 16MB cache instead of 8MB which most of the others had. But I'm not sure after reading some spec charts on the drive I passed on. I'm wondering if I would see any big difference if I had the Samsung drive instead of the WD. Most specs seem pretty close with the exception of the three listed in bold.

SAMSUNG SP2504C
Average Latency 4.17 ms
Average Seek Time 8.9 ms
Buffer Size 8 MB
Capacity 250 GB
Compliant Standards S.M.A.R.T.
Data Transfer Rate 300 MBps
Interface Type Serial ATA II
Internal Data Rate 122 MBps
Max Seek Time 18 ms
Spindle Speed 7200 rpm
Start Stop Cycles 50,000
Track-to-Track Seek Time 0.8 ms

Western Digital WD2500YS
Average Latency 4.2 ms
Average Seek Time 8.7 ms
Buffer Size 16 MB
Capacity 250 GB
Data Transfer Rate 300 MBps
Interface Type Serial ATA-300
Internal Data Rate 70 MBps
Max Seek Time 21 ms
Spindle Speed 7200 rpm
Start Stop Cycles 50,000
Track-to-Track Seek Time 0.6 ms










Operating System: XP Pro v.2002 SP 2
Motherboard: Intel D915G (?) more to follow
Graphic Card: NVidia GeForce 6600
Sound Card: Realtek HD
Processor: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz Model 4, Stepping 1 (Multi-threading)
Hard Disk Drive: 80GB SATA

[Ken Berry]

And this has what to do with Video Studio?

If you are asking whether one will work better with VS than the other, then I would probably have to say you would probably never be able to tell the difference. It might be a different matter if you had two of them set up in a RAID array, but ...

I have a variety of brand and specification hard discs in my computer -- including, as it happens, WD and Samsung -- and I use them all at various times for video projects (though I have VS on my C:\ drive which is a WD and tend to use mainly a 400 GB WD as my main video drive. But the differences in response times between the discs you are considering is so infinitessimally small as not to make any difference in real life. And the caching size IMHO is largely irrelevant when in any case you are largely dealing with absolutely huge (by comparison) video files...

If I had my druthers, I would probably take the Samsung, but would be quite happy with the WD as well.

[kjfrey1701]

Thanks Ken! Does the Internal Data Rate (S-122MBs vs WD-70MBs) make any difference, or do I just want to look at the overall Average Seek time (slightly better for the WD)? I was thinking of ordering the Samsung and relisting the WD after getting it, but it sounds like it won't be worth the bother.

[Ken Berry]

My point was really that you are talking about such minute fractions of time that it is largely irrelevant in the real world. And you won't notice any difference in the performance of VS with either of them.

[kjfrey1701]

Got it! Thank you for your quick response.

But what if... (Just joking - my kids do that to me all the time!)

Best regards,

Ken