What do you guys think? I'm looking at putting together a low end tower (well, low end for what I'm looking at using it for) to setup a test environment for me to prepare for additional Microsoft certification exams. I can read all the books that I want and I can use the systems in real life but nothing beats building everything from scratch and testing it out on your own. Which is hard to do in real life.

So enough of my rambling. I'm basically looking to put together a tower to run hyper-v off of and a couple of hard drives for holding the VMs. I'm not too concerned about size or having crazy performance. What I was thinking of doing would be putting in 5 or 6 WD Scorpio Black 7200 RPM notebook hard drives instead of using the desktop variety. But I'm not really sure how the performance will compare as it has been a long time since I looked at this consumer level hard drives (I miss my 15K fiber channel drives).

Any ideas?

Matt

well performance on a 5400 rpm compared to higher cache'd 7200 will be noticeable. Where you are using vm's I would be more concerned with the amount of ram you would have in the box.

I have a pc here with an AM2+ board that you can have cheap if you want it. it would be perfect for what you are doing without the lag from a much lower end machine.

I'm looking at the WD Black 7200 RPM notebook drives with 16MB cache. It will either be that or some cheap 7200 RPM desktop drives. I'm thinking smaller platter size will improve performance.

As far as the other parts of the system I'm looking at a Phenom 955 Black Edition and 12 GB DDR3 1333 RAM. The rest doesn't really matter. Thanks for the offer on the board but I won't need it .

Cheers,

Matt

Density on drives does matter, but from my understanding bigger drives will still be faster than smaller ones because most of the platter is further away from the point of rotation making it's velocity faster at those points.

Think of two cars driving down a road at say 3000rpm but one has 15" wheels where as the other has 20" wheels. Each minute the tires on each car are rotated 3000 times but the tread on the 20" wheel (if cut apart and laid out in a line) will be longer than that of the 15" wheel. I'm not going to bother with the math to get the circumference because I'm just trying to illustrate a quick point here but it's that comparing RPM's from desktop drives to laptop drives is a bit like comparing apples to oranges as their size is different.

I would suggest checking out storagereview.com to get a better idea on how differing drives compare in different situations but I have a strong feeling you'll want a desktop drive as it will be cheaper and faster on average.

Good point and thanks for the link. I'll take a look there as well.

Matt

I happen to use a WD Scorpio Black 320GB drive for my main OS drive in my desktop.
The drive gets about 67MB/s average read/write with about a 14ms average seek time. If memory serves this is about equivalent to a WD Blue series desktop drive.