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CPryorFlag for United States of America

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RPMs or chache ?

I have a 166MMX (66Mhz bus) with 128M RAM running 98. Looking to get a newer bigger faster EIDE hard drive. What's more important: RPMs or cache ? Does it really matter since I'm still using a (relatively) slower 66Mhz Bus, or will performance of the hard drive actually be a factor ? I'm thinking of dabbling in some audio and video editing, which is why I'm even considering hard drive performance.
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CPryor
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Edited text of question.
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Mrbreeze

CPryor,
The high RPM is probably your best bet, though cache is important. Most drives are going to have about the same cache anyway. Don't cut back to far on the cache but in overall performance the higher RPM's is gonna give you more bang for the buck.

Also the 66 bus is not the bus that the drive will be using and what you want is a drive that is UDMA/33 at minimum. The new drives are starting to have UDMA/66 but that would require a new controller and I don't think it will really benefit you now, but it is something to consider.
                         Mrbreeze
ATA 66 drivers (in theroy upto 66 meg a second) i have never in my life got a drive to go faster than 9 meg a second (udma 33 drives) but really though can you really see a ata 66 going at 66 meg a second? what rpm is that?

cpryor, how about this, 3 gig or ram and turning it into a ram disk, often dreamed about doing that with games, i once did it actually with 64 meg of memory, i loaded doom2 into memory (the whole game) and played straigt from memory to memory, it took about 1/2 to load.... very good, but yeah RPM i agree is needeed however they do charge more for cache now though.....
Mrbreeze is right! - But if cost doesnt matter you might look at SCSI and Firewire which is 2 different BUS technologies which gives you an optimal bandwith ! - UDMA/66 is great with a HD with a RPM around og bigger than 7200 !
And on the other hand you might not get such a great performanceincrease with a 7200 RPM HD in a PIO2-3 or UDMA/33 HD because of the relatively narrow bandwith! So the best thing you could do, is to consider a purchase of a new MB/CPU/HD. And the size of the HD scouldnt be smaller that 13Gb - preferably larger ! Video does demand an awful lot of space and bandwith!
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jhance

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jhance , you are right but you need an update :), have you ever heard about Ide Raid 0,1 controllers ?
  I have a system with 2 Ibm ide 7200 rpm Udma 66 drives and a Raid 0 controller and it  is faster compared to my old 2040UW SCSI and a lot cheaper.

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I guess I should have stated that I have a limited budget. Of course a faster processor, fatser RAM, and switching to SCSI would give greater performance, but that's not an option.

Let me clarify:

1) Let's assume that I DO have a system where hard drive performance matters (fast bus, fats RAM, fast chip) What's more important: cache or RPMs ?

2) Given the system that I have, will a faster hard drive give better performance, or is the bus too slow for disk performance to have an impact on overall performance ? I realize that changing other things (bus,RAM,chip)will probably yield a better performance increase, but I'm asking specifically about the hard drive on the system that I have.
CPryor,
I would suggest you go with RPM first and Cache second, besides the hogh RPM drive is probably gonna have the cache you need anyway. The RPM is going to give you faster access so you won't wait as long for the data to read where the cache will place info in that will speed you up if you access the same data but will have to dump to bring new in.
RPM or Cache?    RPM

Also since there has been a proposed answer you either need to accept it or if you don't feel it is the best solution to your question, reject it. You can choose any comment as an asnswer and if you don't feel that any of them answer your situation, you can delete the question.
                    Mrbreeze
"I guess I should have stated that I have a limited budget. Of course a faster processor, fatser RAM, and switching to SCSI would give greater performance, but that's not an option"
"What's more important: cache or RPMs?"

"Forget your IDE drives here"


Life, it is strange sometimes hehehe
                             Mrbreeze