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Author Topic: Which is most important - Drive speed or seek time?  (Read 3001 times)

gnet158

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Which is most important - Drive speed or seek time?
« on: April 05, 2012, 11:05:27 AM »
I've been reading a ton of stuff on the subject from sites like tom's hardware and others.  Which is most important for a NAS?

Drive speed (7200/5900/5400)
or
seek time?

I can same a bit buy buynig "slower drives".  Looking for some real world advice.

Thanks!
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japa-fi

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  • Posts: 23
Re: Which is most important - Drive speed or seek time?
« Reply #1 on: April 06, 2012, 12:18:38 AM »
(obligatory car analogy)
Your question is bit like:
I got my self a new trailer. Which is more importand for the car towing it: higher top speed or good acceleration?

Well, it depends. Are you mostly and most of the time transferring big files in and out of the NAS _AND_ nas speed is the slowest link in your system? Then it's the HD speed. On my setup, the slowest link is the network speed.

Are you continously accessing multiple small files from the nas? Continously as in: running your operating system from the NAS or having drive more time active than inactive? then it's the seeking time.

Personally, I would pt more weight on the energy effiency (=less heat) and noise levels. I'll be getting "slow" drive (5400 rpm or some such). On my current setup using Gb switch for the occasional big chunk of data that I need to transfer, I get ~30Mb/sec. Regular use over wireless, I get 2-6Mb/sec and for that, the drive speed is definately not the limiting factor.
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