Topic: 15,000rpm HD in a cheap Dell; doable?

[thegallery]

At the end of the summer I want to pick up a decent Dell. I don't need the top of the line processor, as there seems to be a price jump to some of the fastest machines. But I'm thinking maybe their  3.40GHz Optiplex or 3.0 dual core thing.

But I notice in some of their really high end machines they have 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm hard drives available. Does the motherboard have to be special to run these HD's? I don't know anything about SATA or multiple HDs, but I know I'd like to have Windows and major software running off a really fast HD. I figure with a fast HD and around 2 gigs of ram I'll be happy.

I also want to run between 3 and 5 monitors. I don't need high end video gaming, but I like to have my email in one screen, calendar in another, and other screens for whatever I'm working on at the time. If at least one monitor can play video games and handle multimedia that would be great. I planned just to add couple extra video cards, but not sure of the cheapest easiest ways to do this. I do need to process graphics for photo editing, and I occasionally run 3D software like Rhino. But my graphic needs are not that of a gamers'.

I'm hoping, without monitors, to keep the price close to 1000. That should be a decent machine with a couple extra vid cards, and hopefully a faster HD.

I have one 19" LCD already and will add two with the new system purchase for a total of 3 to start. I want the option of adding more in the future though.

For the past three years I've been running 2 monitors off my Tablet PC, and I love it. I just regret not being able to add more.

Thanks for your thoughts...

[Sandra]

SATA drives come as SATA 1 at 150 mbs and usually 7,200 rpm.
SATA 11 are 300 mbs and still at 7,200rpm.
Its the motherboards BIOS that determines if it will support SATA 1 and 11 or just 1.

I did hear of some 10,000 rpm but havent seen one, thats usually SCSI speeds and I havent even heard of a 15,000 rpm drive.

Dont know about multiple monitors sorry.

[gmax]

Western Digital Raptors 10,000 sata,
they have been around for a couple of years,very fast but very expensive

I would not buy from dell, in Australia they have a shocking service record,
if you cant build a pc yourself research the components and get one custom built locally

[thegallery]

What does SCSI mean? I assume the bootable HD then has to be 7200 then?

If you put together their higher end systems that's where they offer the 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm HDs. But they seem to do them as secondary drives rather than bootable drives, but I'm not sure really.  And they are only offered on the premium systems.

Like millions of others I've bought cheap Dells for years without a hitch. I don't know of any company with a good rep for customer service, but I do know that the few times I've had problems they've been taken care of.

[Sandra]

Cant think of the exact wording but its something like SC Serial Interface.

They are very fast drives for data transfer and are hot swappable.
They tend to be used in RAID setups in servers by banks and such businesses where data loss would be disastrous so if a drive failed its already backed up by a second or third drive and can simply be pulled out and a replaced with a new drive without shutting the server down and the data is automatically backed up to the new drive.

They are very expensive and dont seem to come in very large capacities.
36 gig ones are around £120 even now  :shock:

Most people usually use the fastest drive for their boot drive but to be honest I didnt notice any real difference between using a 5,400rpm IDE drive and a 7,200 IDE drive, on the same spec of pc.

SATA should in theory be faster but as theyre usually in more complex and newer pcs its hard to compare them to IDE.

My latest pc has a 7,200 SATA 11 drive as its boot drive but it takes a long time to get around to the actual booting from the hard drive part but once it starts booting from that drive it is quite quick to load XP.

[gmax]

The term "SCSI" is an acronym for Small Computer System Interface.
 the bootable HD can be any HD, SCSI are used mainly for servers,
if your happy with DELL then use them , can you provide a link to these
high end DELLS your looking at? i have 2 ,7,200 SATA 1 HDD"s in a raid 0
data stripping array, it's pretty fast, if you want a real fast system try two,10,000 rpm raptors in raid 0 array :wink: it all depends how much money
you want to spend.

[Reno]

The speed of the hard drive is important when your moving data from drive to drive. If your using a 5 hd raid setup for a mail server and one drive goes down you want to plug another in and hit the ground running without the service being effected.

With scsi drives are really cool but you need a scsi controller card to use them. Thats why you see them as secondary drives. The machine will spot the onboard controller and windows will use the scsi driver to spot the controller card then it will find the hd after its finished booting.

My friend would have a scsi 15000rpm drive hold his 15gig mail archive. When he wanted to search for a specific word or topic you could hear that thing pluggin away. Fast as a bat out of hell.

If your not running a raid setup there's little use for a hard drive that fast. You wouldn't ever use it. 7500rpm will more than handle anything you would be doing for home use.

[thegallery]

Thanks for all the info.

I'm not sure this will work but this is a link to the computer I'm looking at, Dell Precision 380:
http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=2p38ghot&s=bsd

I don't do high end computing, but I do some 3D modeling, design websites and work at the computer at least 8 hours a day while running multiple programs. So I want a very capable computer; something beyond the basic home system. I also have a home network and plan to sync my old Tablet PC to the new computer for at least my email and graphic files.

I'm not sure this will make sense, but here is Dell's choices for hard drives; they only seem to offer these on the higher end system. There is a 10,000RMP Sata option and I guess I could use that as a boot drive...

 Hard Drive Configuration
 Note: All Systems include embedded SATA RAID capability. RAID 0 Raid 1 requires at least 2 drives.
 C1 All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration
 
   C1 All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration [Included in Price]  
 
   C1a All SATA drives, Non-RAID, 2 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C2 All SATA drives, RAID 0, 2 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C3 All SATA drives, RAID 0, 3 drive total configuration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   C4 All SATA drives, RAID 0, 4 drive total configuration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   C5 All SATA drives, RAID 1, 2 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C6 All SATA drives, RAID 5, 3 drive total configuration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   C7 All SATA drives, RAID 5, 4 drive total configuration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   C8 All SATA drives, RAID 10, 4 drive total configuration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   C9 All SCSI drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C10 All SCSI drives, Non-RAID, 2 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C11 All SCSI drives in RAID 0, 2 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C12 All SCSI drives in RAID 0, 3 drive total configuration [add $99]  
 
   C13 All SCSI drives, RAID 1, 2 drive total configuration add $0  
 
   C14 SATA boot with 1 additional SCSI, 2 total drive configuration add $0  
 
   C15 SATA boot with 2 additional SCSI, RAID 0, 3 drive total confguration [add $99]  
 
   C16 SATA boot with 2 additional SATA, RAID 0, 3 drive total confguration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   C17 SATA boot with 3 additional SATA, RAID 0, 4 drive total confguration add $0  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 

   Hard Drive Internal Controller Option
 Internal SCSI controller is required when ordering SCSI drives
 
 Select options below
  
 
   None  
 
   39320A Internal U320 SCSI Controller with RAID 0 or 1 [add $67]  
 
   Boot Hard Drive
 For hard drives, GB means 1 billion bytes, total accessible capacity varies depending on operating environment.
Mixing of SATA/SCSI Hard Drives is allowed, but the 1st Hard drive or Boot Hard drive must be SATA..
When Ordering SCSI Hard drives, you must select a SCSI controller.
When ordering RAID, all hard drives in the RAID must be exactly the same capacity, speed, and type.
 
 
 80GB SATA, 10K RPM Hard Drive with DataBurst Cache? without RAID
  
 Help Me Choose  
 
   80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache? w/out RAID [subtract $130]  
 
   80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache? for RAID [subtract $130]  
 
   160GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache? w/out RAID [subtract $99]  
 
   160GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache? for RAID [subtract $99]  
 
   250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache? w/out RAID [subtract $59]  
 
   250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache? for RAID [subtract $59]  
 
   320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache? w/out RAID [subtract $29]  
 
   320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache? for RAID [subtract $29]  
 
   500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache? w/out RAID [add $171]  
 New Lower Price
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   500GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache? for RAID [add $171]  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
   750GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache? w/out RAID [add $371]  
 
   750GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache? for RAID [add $371]  
 
   80GB SATA, 10K RPM Hard Drive with DataBurst Cache? without RAID [Included in Price]  
 
   80GB SATA, 10K RPM Hard Drive with DataBurst Cache? for RAID add $0  
 
   36GB Ultra 320 SCSI, 1 inch (15,000 rpm) [add $21]  
 
   73GB Ultra 320 SCSI, 1 inch (10,000 rpm) [add $51]  
 
   73GB Ultra 320 SCSI, 1 inch (15,000 rpm) [add $121]  
 
   146GB Ultra 320 SCSI, 1 inch (15,000 rpm) [add $371]  
 
   300GB Ultra 320 SCSI, 1 inch (10,000 rpm) [add $371]  
  May delay your Dell Precision 380 ship date
 
 
there are more options for the multiple HD choices...

[Reno]

If your just using this for working webdesign and working with video then do yourself a favor and just get what they have on sale. You do not NEED a raid array unless your working with mail servers or running an online buisness. You certainly don't need anything more than 7500rpm hard drives. Multiple video displays are cool and very useful when doing video editing so from where im sitting its justifiable.

Now don't get me wrong. Showing your $2500 machine off to your friends may be what you have in mind for this machine, but if you need it to do the tasks your talking about then just get whats on sale.  :wink: If you throw all that money into it now it'll be worth 1/3 its original price in under two years. The rule of thumb with computers is to just buy whats on sale every 2 years or so and donate your old one to family or a church for a tax refund.

[thegallery]

yeah, I hear ya. I did upgrade my tablet pc HD from a 5400 to a 7200, and feel it does make a difference, but I suppose it's not that significant. And with these Dells the processor is the same on the cheaper models, though on this one for example there are options of even more speed for a premium price.

I will make the smart choice here and put the extra money into the extra monitors. I'll probably just configure their system with a dual monitor card, and then hopefully add another of my own down the line.

thanks again for the explanation of it all.