Hard Drive

[americancritic]

Hello, I have HP-Pavillion desktop and I am hoping to find out about up-dating my hard drive and was wondering if someone could give me some advice. This is my system.

HP-Pavillion a6530f Desktop PC
Motherboard M2N68-LA (Narra3)
Chipset: NVIDIA GeForce 6150 nForce 430
Memory Sockets 4 x DDR2 - 8 gigs of ram
Processor: AMD Phenom x3 8450 triple-core Processor/operating speed 2.1 Ghz
Hard Drive: 640 GB
Interface: SATA
Transfer rating: 3.0 Gb/sec
Potational Speed: 7200 RPM
External Hard Drive is also 640 GB's
CD/DVD Disk Drive: SuperMulti 16X DVD(+/-)R/RW 12X Ram(+/-)R DL Lightscribe
15-in-1 Multimedia Card Reader

OS: Windows Vista Home Premium 64 bit sp2

I would like to get a lot faster speed out of my computer and this is one of the recomendation's since I just bumped up the ram to 8 gigs.

Thanks
americancritic

 

[Brink]

Hello Americancritic,

It really depends on how much you save and copy to and from your hard drive.

If you do a lot of saving or copying, the fastest hard drive out there now that would save you time would be a OCZ Vertex 2 SSD (solid state) drive. However, they usually run around $200 or so for 100GB.

If not, then it may not be worth paying the premium for a SSD.

Hope this helps some,
Shawn

 

[whs]

I agree with Shawn. A SSD will make a world of difference. I just saw this very good SSD for $75 (after MIR). It is only 40GB but for the OS that should suffice - if you move the user data to the spinners and delete the hiberfile.

And if you do not want to go thru the manual routine to move the OS, get this program. For $19.95 it saves you a lot of trouble. I have tested it and found it very efficient and and easy to use.

There is no other piece of hardware that can compete with SSDs if you are looking for speed. I have equipped all my systems with SSDs (even my laptops) and will never go back to spinners for the OS.

 

[americancritic]

Hello and thank you for your recommendation but I use a lot of hard drive space with photo's, graphic art and I am a sketch artist so I have a lot that I need space for, what do you think about a hard drive called a TB I think that is what a friend told me, is thier something I can get with a lot of space and faster then what I have, I do value your advice and I think you know I am kind of new at computers. My wife and kids got me involved because of my art plus staying in touch with family and friends all over the country. Also I have almost 9000. sketchs that I have done and want to get in to the computer.

Please tell me where to go in the forum just to talk about any issue.

Also if you could update me as far as the hard drive, plus I only have the restore disk's that HP sent to me when I bought the computer in 2008.

Thanks

americancritic

 

[americancritic]

Oh I was also told that if I want my computer to run faster that I should put in a different "Processor" is this true, and I don't know what spinners and delete the hiberfile is and have never heard this term would you please break it down a little bit for me so I know what your talking about. Also if I plug in my external hard drive and keep it that way and download everything to that would it speed up the system or not because I would be saving everything there and not on the computer or this has nothing to do with helping speed things up. Statement of (never go back to spinners for the os) I do not understand what you are saying with this. I am a bay with a bottle stuck in my mouth when it comes to this so please help me understand. Thank You so much for your help.

americancritic

 

[Brink]

Americancritic,

Since you are needing more space than anything, I would recommend to stick with 7200 RPM SATA hard drives then. You can get them for pretty good prices these days for 1 TB sizes. The bigger the cache size in MB the better.

This is a good 1TB HDD. It's cheap enough where you might get more than one to run in a RAID 0 for faster speeds.

Newegg.com - SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD103SJ 1TB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

 

[whs]

Sorry for the terminology confusion.

Spinners are spinning disks (HDDs) as opposed to solid state disks (SSDs) that have no moving parts.

The hiberfile elimination is just a convenient way to save a bit of space on a SSD (since SSDs are usually small - because large ones cost too much money). The hiberfile is the space where the system stores the content of the memory (RAM) during hibernation. But since most people do not use hibernation, but sleep mode instead, one can usually get rid of it. The hiberfile, which would be appr. 8GBs in your case, would take a big chunk on a 40GB SSD.

Nevertheless, if you are looking for a real performance boost, I would still install a small SSD for the OS in addition to the HDD. Then you leave the user data on the HDD (the one you have right now or a bigger one) and the system only on the SSD. You would be amazed how much snappier your system would get.

An additional option is to keep your current 640GB HDD, install an additional e.g. 1TB HDD plus a SSD for the OS. Then you have plenty of space plus performance. I believe the HP boxes usually have enough room for such a setup.

If that is something you would consider, post back and we can discuss the details of the operation.