# Storage 7200 disk speed vs 5400 read -advice



## Rose Weir (Aug 9, 2012)

New build coming up and I have some decisions to make within the consideration that I tend to keep the machine for at least 4 years. The current one has an intermittent boot up glitch and repair centre default is to reinstall Win7. If I have to reinstall EVERYTHING and configure I figure I might as well do it on a new machine and this one is entering its 4th year.
Two configurations to choose from" FX 8150
AMD FX8150 8 core 3.6 GHZ CPU
Asus AMD 880G Motherboard (GPU boost and Usb 3)
500 Gb Western Digital Caviar Black boot drive
1 Tb WD Caviar Blue (storage)
[I have already put in an enquiry to have 2TB for storage]
16GB 1600 Corsair Vengeance Ram (This amount of ram is necessary for the core factor)
Sapphire Radeon 7750 1gb video card
Total=1300.55 with Canadian Tax

AMDFX6100 6 core 3.3 Ghz CPU
8 Gb 1600 Ram
and everything else is the same as the above
Total=1082.45 including Cdn tax which is 13%

I inquired about having the 2 WD BLACK as the storage drive and the response was that it would be 100.00 more. The builder's opinion is that storage read/write (i.e.5400) isn't as vital as boot drive. He indicated a 2TB WD blue drive would be 25.00 more

Lightroom does do a steady and likely high amount of read/write I'm asking for input on choice of storage drive as listed above.
I'm on a 4 core with a WD green hard drive(energy efficient, likely 5400) and 8 ram. 
No problems here with Lr4.1 . If it is backing up then it sucks up all the resources but overall I have no irritation or complaints.

The price difference is neglible between the two ( approx 250 or so) I have an upgrade version of Win7 so I have to have a new Win7 on this build.
I'm inclined to go with the 8150 thinking long term but its the storage drive characteristics that has me wondering.

Any input for either build listed above appreciated such as would it better to increase ram on the 6100.
 This 6100 was the builder's first suggestion but I asked for a comparison of a stronger system.
Specifically input on the drive storage is my main query which ever machine it is.

Rose


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## ukbrown (Aug 9, 2012)

You boot up, it takes a minute.  You use lightroom for 2-3 hours, faster drive for pictures or faster drive for boot.  Which one will save you the most time in the long run??


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## Jim Wilde (Aug 10, 2012)

Rose, in terms of your 8150 vs 6100 question, I personally would go with the most powerful CPU that I could afford, because that's where you'll see most benefit overall (preview rendering, exports, etc are very CPU-intensive). So that would indicate 8150, though I personally would be going with an Intel chip rather than AMD (the latter is much better from a price-performance perspective, but Intel wins hands-down in the outright performance war), but of course that would drive up the cost by another $100 or so for something like the i7-2700k, or $150 more for the i7-3770k. 

Don't get me wrong, there's nothing wrong with the FX8150, I'm sure it would be just fine (certainly outperforms the i7-930 that I've got, and LR4.1 works fine for me), I just have a preference for the better speed of the Intel chips.

RAM: 8gb or more should be fine....if you can afford a bit more that would be even better but no need to go too mad unless you have other apps which might need more. If I was building a new system today, I'd probably install a minimum of 16GB, and a max of 24GB.

That brings us round to the hard drives.....and the problem with having lots of RAM and a super-fast CPU is that you have to get the data to them quickly enough to take advantage. And to be perfectly honest, 5400 spin speed drives just aren't good enough in that respect. I have 4 internal hard drives, all running at 7200 rpm, and I *still *can't get data to my CPU fast enough to make best use of it. I simply cannot ever 'red-line' the CPU at 100%, even the occasional spike to 100% is rare....so do yourself a favour and get nothing less than 7200prm drives if your budget allows (an SSD and a couple of 10k drives would be much better, but would drive the cost up considerably).


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## Rose Weir (Aug 10, 2012)

Thanks for the input.
I'll discuss the 7200 speed choices with the builder.
You wrote that you have 4 internal drives. I wondered what size is each? 
Currently I have two medium (500) and 1 large(1Tb) The 1TB is partitioned for OS and then 600 storage. I wouldn't do this type of configuration again and the current builder isn't partial to partitioning when the boot drive is involved.
The builder's opinion is that 8ram would bottleneck the 8150 system therefore the 16
Yes SSD would be nice for the boot drive. At the moment I can wait for system or software to take a little longer to arrive on the screen <grin> I don't translate the actual size that you mean when you write 'couple of 10K drives
I could have a 2Tb partitioned into 3 storage areas or replicate the structure that I have now. 
I don't use the Win7 users Documents I treat one of the smaller drives as MYDocuments. Large External drives hold copies and backups.

Rose


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## clee01l (Aug 10, 2012)

That is '10K' as in 10,000rpm The next on the ever increasing spin rate race. 5400rpms are pretty much obsolete technology by current standards.


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## Rose Weir (Aug 10, 2012)

Good grief! 10,000
I didn't even occur to me to input 10,000 when I did a google for 7200 <grin>
I wonder if it is only certain brands that are doing this.

As an aside I had to explain the process of Lightroom to the builder using Jim Wilde's words actually and THEN I got a response back agreeing to my thoughts of separate drives and 7200. I had said I'd prefer a separate drive for Lightroom's catalog, cache etc then I had to explain why. Sometimes storage isn't JUST storage <grin>
Rose


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## Jim Wilde (Aug 10, 2012)

Rose Weir said:


> I had said I'd prefer a separate drive for Lightroom's catalog, cache etc then I had to explain why. Sometimes storage isn't JUST storage <grin>
> Rose



That's why I have 4 internal drives: OS/Programs on one, catalogs on two, ACR cache on three, and images on four. Stick to your guns and get what you want, and don't let him talk you into partitioning (or 5400rpm drives).

There are a couple of manufacturers of high spin speed drives, though the Western Digital Velociraptor is probably the most well known. Beat Gossweiler has some of those in his system, I'm quite envious. I would have liked a couple in my system but I rather blew my budget! 

Definitely next time!


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## GBM (Sep 10, 2012)

TNG said:


> That's why I have 4 internal drives: OS/Programs on one, catalogs on two, ACR cache on three, and images on four. Stick to your guns and get what you want, and don't let him talk you into partitioning (or 5400rpm drives).........
> Definitely next time!



Rose, You are AT ' next time' when you say you want it to last the next four years... take Jim's advice for sure.   Hard drives are often used while working for temporary storage ... swapping ....so the spin/read/write speeds of the hard drives are actually more important than is obvious sometimes....  You can have a fast CPU and fast RAM...and the hard drive be a bottle neck in the work flow...and you be wondering what is slowing things down.


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