I think consumers will be most concerned with RPM; boot times, load times, wait time.
IMO most important in order is basically sequential read, then random write, then random read, and finally sequential write.
As so many systems have some degree of fragmentaion, ask yourself, what disk I/O happens most frequently? - - random reads!
After a
good defrag, sequental reads should dominate.
Boot time is nice if it is really low, but as that occurs only ONCE per session, so don't get myopic on that metric - -
focus on what occurs most frequently - - imo, lauching any program
[*].
Some background on HD performance.
There are three measurements for a single I/O:
- move the arm to the proper location, (ie SEEK)
- let the platter rotate to the right secord (ie rotational delay)
- DRM the data into (out of) memory, (ie read/write)
Years gone by when we had multiple platters on one HD, there was a HEAD SWITCH that followed the SEEK.
If the SEEK costs 100
units, the rotational delay is typically 10
units and the final read/write will cost 1
unit.
Seek times are relatively fixed, and the read/write time is trivial compared to the other two.
It ends-up, that rotation delay is inversely related to RPM; the faster the drive, the lower the delay.
Laptops usually opt for 5400 rpm as it saves battery life.
There's a great tool
Defragler, which allows you to pick precisely which files get compressed into contiguous sectors.
Run that under an Admin-ID and defrag EVERY DLL or *.EXE that is more than one fragment.
This will vastly improve
[*] noted above.
Now that the programs have been optimized, run a full defrag to fix the other stuff.
Oh yea, don't minimize the degradation that a
fragmented pagefile will cause you!
Look for
PageDefragand run that once in a while