Hi;
I just wanted to inform you about this:
There's a lot of hype about the Barracuda HDDs, because they are A LITTLE less moisy than other 7200rpm drives.
But I just read a review about HDDs in a Dutch computer magazine.
Only 1 drive was a 5400rpm model: the Maxtor Barracuda3.
All others were 7200rpm drives. Among them were the Cuda 4 and a Samsung drive.
In the test, it turned out that the 5400rpm Fireball3 was FASTER in both read- and write performance than the Barracuda 4 and the Samsung.
I mean average read-write performance, but isn't that more important than peak-performance which just occurs every now and then?
Mind you: the only drive in the test supporting ATA-133 was that 5400rpm drive, but over ATA-100 this only increases cache access, not really read-write-performance.
![Shocked :shock:](./images/smilies/icon_eek.gif)
What's the use then of 7200rpm Cudas or Samasungs, if they usually perform worse than one of the newest 5400rpm drives on the market?
I don't know about the Cuda5 performance though, but anyway, according to that test, the Cuda4 is slower than the new 5400rpm Maxtor Fireball3.
I can tell you that my 5400rpm Maxtor D540X (an older model) is totally silent. Even if I put my head inside the case, I can barely hear if it's spinning or not.
And to put an end to another farytale: you don't need 7200rpm to record video in DVD-quality.
See: DVD quality means roughly 4-6Gb/hour. That comes down to roughly 1-4Mbyte/second to record. Even the slowest 4200rpm notebook drive can do that. Heck, even my SCSI-ZIP drive can do that!
So it's only for video-EDITING that faster drives are better.
But if your video editing is limited to cutting away the ads during a TV show, even a 5400rpm drive can do that in less than 5 seconds.
Hope this helps.
Greetings;
Carl