What is more important for real time, daily use, RPM speed or Cache size?

[Matt_Smi]

After recently going though two different 74 GB Raptors (RMA’ed them both), I was disappointed by their performance and high noise level. The Raptors look great on paper and in benchmarks and smoke almost every other drive, but to me the difference in real world every day usage was not that big, programs opened and installed a bit quicker but the difference was not huge. And I don’t know what people are talking about saying windows took them 10 minutes to install, it took about the same amount of time (30-40 minutes), and was maybe 5 minutes faster overall. Although I do admit that boot times were pretty impressive, sometimes the windows loading screen would only show a bar or three and I timed it a few times and boot times were between 15-20 seconds (to the desktop), not sure why it varies. But then again my Dell with a lowly 7,200 RPM (2 MB cache) WD caviar drive can boot to windows in 25 seconds, and since my PC is on almost all the time, boot times are not that important to me.

So for now I am just using my 120 GB Seagate Barracuda until I can decide on another drive to buy, I have my eye on this drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144701 either that or I may wait and see if Seagate comes out with a similar drive. Maxtor has a few tempting drives with 16 MB of cache as well but I do not really trust them, I only trust Seagate and WD, but according to Maximum PC, this drive http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144421 is supposed to be as fast as the Raptor for real world performance. Does anyone own this drive? I also want my drive to be quiet and every Maxtor I have ever heard sounds like a meat grinder, I am hoping the new ones are quiet though. I wonder if any company has a 10,000 RPM drive with a 16 MB cache in the works, that would be the best of both worlds, although it would probably be very expensive and have a low capacity, but I would not be surprised if WD had a Raptor 2 in the works, as the original has been out for almost two years now correct?

[Jaggannath]

Big cache is important for starting up, definitely
As to boot-up times, they are usually more dependent on the number of applications being run at start up rather than HDD speed

[Matt_Smi]

Big cache is important for starting up, definitely
As to boot-up times, they are usually more dependent on the number of applications being run at start up rather than HDD speed

Yep, I agree, this is why my Dell is able to boot in 25 seconds, I only have two things running at startup as well as many services disabled and only 18 background processes being loaded. But the Raptor defiantly loaded the OS a bit quicker all things equal, you also think a 16 MB cache drive would show an improvement in boot times over an 8 MB drive?

[faulkner132]

Biggest factor for hard drive speed is RPM. Cache hits on a HD are not as common as you would think. Of course, bigger is better, but given the choice I would go for the the higher RPM's.

[jfk]

I will agree that startup processes affect boot times, probably far more than the HDD itself. My sig rig boots slightly faster than my Dell 4600 with a Maxtor hdd that has a 8 Mb cache. The difference is just a few seconds. However, the sig rig loads programs faster than the 4600. The difference is only maybe one to several seconds, but I figure over time it adds up. Why I used the Raptor was more for gaming performance, loading maps and such, which is where it shines over the 4600. My oldest son plays the same games as I do using my 4600, and I always am booted into the game and on the next map long before he is.

For every day performance, a 7200 rpm, 8 Mb cache hdd will probably give most people all the performance we need.