Hi all, my site now uses about 25GB bandwidth, and I am thinking of switching host. The new host however, uses only 5400RPM IDE disk, so I was wondering if it will affect my speed. Peak at my site will have about 200-300 people online at the same time

Any thoughts on this? thanks

5400 rpm drives barely have a lower sustained data transfer rate, but they do have a slightly higher latency, about 2ms higher on average. so for a db server its not as good but its fine for hosting. we have a server with a maxtor 5400 drive and its fine. never stressed. while back one of our customers got just a bit famous (he writes freeware) and the server got bent 3 ways from sunday and never feel over or slowed down in the slightest. cpu load went from 0.4% to a stonking 0.6% completely wiping out its previous peak of 0.5% :) 25 gb isnt major, he blew 8 gb in a day.

its hard to make a judgement from what youce said, 2-300 people views a php or static site on a 1 gig processor and 512 mb ram should be fine. throw in the fact theyre using a forum and it all goes to rat****. that would probably start to struggle a little. for a static site i doubt the hard drive would be troubled as a well configured machine would have most of it in cache. for a static site i would put the extra money into a gig of ram , if theres a high amount of db useage then id go for the 7200 or scsi.

it all depends on what these people will be doing on your site. and what else will be on the server if your not going dedicated. if its shared hosting then youd have to judge the load of the server.

I'll bet you anything you won't feel the difference between 5400 RPM and 7200 RPM.

simple thing you have to look out for.

If the host is running 5400 rpm's then you don't want high drive I/O stuff ( databases and such ), otherwise it's perfectly fine for a simple back-up drive

Mike

oh man...my site has a database for my different articles, hopefully the 5400 RPM drive wouldn't affect it too much.

maxtor 5400's yack! thats an ugly drive man :)

-Brendan

i have a semi-popular completely php/mysql driven site, with 6000 registered users and a 28mb database using about 70gb of bandwidth per month and it's on a 5400rpm drive and it runs just fine in my opinion.

i am thinking of sticking ina 7200rpm/ata133 drive just to see if i can notice a difference however. hmmmmmmm.

whats wrong with maxtors. if youd said western digital i would agree. ive used maxtor exclusively pretty much for the past few years, the only drive thats ever gone was a fudgeitsu which was a gift. also got some seagate cudas in another server which seem perfectly capable. the maxtor has performed brilliantly and reliably as have all the ones i have at home. maybe you have just had bad luck with them?

You'll find that the 5400RPM drive just can't handle heavy I/O activity as quickly as a 7200RPM (or even higher RPM SCSI) drive can.

This doesn't mean that it will be slower than a 7200RPM however. It only means that it will be slower than a 7200RPM with the same activity.

It will only be slower if your host puts too much on it and lets it get slow. If they use load averages to determine capacity you should be just fine as disk activity is averaged into that.

it will only be slower for random access :) sequential reads should be very similar. sustained data transfer rate is more closely correlated to aerial density of the platters.