I bought an 80g Maxtor 7200 in 2002. I want to install it as a 2nd
disk on a PC to run dual-boot linux, but I was wondering if it is fast
enough.
Ok, but is running the OS _ALL_ it's going to do? That's a
fairly trivial thing, surely you want to DO something with
the system... and therein lies the details of whether
this drive is going to be a significant bottleneck to your
uses.
If you replaced it, what would you get? If a budget grade
drive, of course it won't have near the performance increase
as, say a WD Raptor or 10K+ RPM SCSI. If you have enough
data to mostly fill the drive, this too will be a more
significant slowdown for some of the data relative to a
larger capacity drive.
In general, the performance different wouldn't "usually" be
enough to reject the drive in favor of a new one, but if you
have cash to burn and are itching to speed things up as much
as possible, a newer drive is one viable way to spend the
money. I'd expect a (very rough guesstimation, since there
are so many variables) 15-25% performance increase overall.
Have disks changed that much in 4 years to warrant buying a new HD
instead of using this one? The 80g should be plenty for what I want to
use it for.
Not really, but if you're working with a lot of data and
concurrent reads and writes, it could help to add the 2nd
drive anyway and have two of them in the systemm, dividing
that *simultaneous* disk I/O between the two.
