First post, by squareguy
- Rank
- Oldbie
I am slowly building my new Windows XP box and this one will be a permanent build... 🤣, well hopefully. Nothing is set in stone yet except for the audio card and the graphics card which will be a Creative X-Fi Titanium PCI-e (SB0880) and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285. Oh and of course the maximum 4GB of RAM.
So far all of the motherboards\systems I am currently looking at have Windows XP AHCI drivers so I started looking at hard drive choices. I want something below the 2TB maximum MBR partition for Windows XP and the best possible performance at a reasonable cost and no compatibility issues. That knocks any SSD off the list since XP doesn't support them natively. I love the Seagate drives because they have SmartAlign http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/whitepaper/tp … n_for_af_4k.pdf so I just forget about the 4k sector size issue.
I just noticed the Seagate FireCuda series http://www.seagate.com/www-content/product-co … /100804185a.pdf and they of course support SmartAlign, are 7200 RPM, have 64MB cache, come in 1 and 2TB sizes, inexpensive, and most importantly they are SSHDs with 8GB of NAND to boost performance. Seagate claims up to 5x faster load speeds (not sure about actual results but it must be an improvement) and since the NAND is handled internally to the drive XP doesn't even need to be aware of it, i.e. no issues with lack of TRIM. It seems to me this might be the best option for a new Windows XP hard drive.
Thoughts / experience?
Gateway 2000 Case and 200-Watt PSU
Intel SE440BX-2 Motherboard
Intel Pentium III 450 CPU
Micron 384MB SDRAM (3x128)
Compaq Voodoo3 3500 TV Graphics Card
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Sound Card
Western Digital 7200-RPM, 8MB-Cache, 160GB Hard Drive
Windows 98 SE