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[pfrechette]

I will be purchasing a new hard disk that will be used on a PC dedicated to playing music.  Does anyone have an opinion on whether a 5400 RPM ATA hard drive (cheap) will suffice or should I spend the money and get a 7200 RPM drive?

[ChicoSelfs]

i have a Maxtor 20 Gb 5400Rpm ATA 100 and i don't have any problems with Play, Encode, Mix...bla bla bla heven with big files in WAV, files like 1 gb and much biggers (Remix)

[DocLotus]

Hi pfrechette;

I’ve been using various Juke Boxes for several years now going back to Real Audio’s Real JukeBox version 1.0.

At that time I had only a 1 Gig 5400 RPM ATA 16 (DMA16, EIDE). Also the drive was almost full which slows down accessing of data.  But with all that, I had no problems playing back ripped music files.

Today’s drives are much faster, usually ATA 66, 100, or 133 regardless of the rotational speed.  This refers to the “burst” mode of a drive, or how fast a small chuck of data can be accessed… the higher the number, the better.  This is perfect for Juke Box lovers as only very small chunks of data are accessed at any one time when you are playing back a music file.

Today’s drives are also much larger, meaning that you will be using less of the drive which helps speed data accessing as more data is crammed into much smaller space.

Example: My old 1 Gig drive had 4 disk (125 Mb per surface).  My new 80 gig drives have only 3 disk (13.333 Gb per surface) & they cost only 1/4 as much as the 1 Gig drive.  Isn’t technology wonderful?

But ripped music files take up a lot of space.  The average CD may take up anywhere from 22 Mb to 60 Mb of disk space.  There is usually a 10 to 1, or 11 to 1 ratio of compression for the ripped files depending on the ripping format & bit rate used.

So get the biggest drive you can afford & double that size as data has a funny way of growing to exceed the size of your hard drive.

So…the drive speed may not be very important for music files but the speed of your other components are very important.  The speed of your computers processor determines how fast you can rip the music file to disk.  The amount of memory will help to stop dropouts on playback as other processes are running.  After all, we do want to hear the music in the background as we are using the computer for other task,  don’t we?