Difference between external and internal hdd transfer rates?

[isaac12345]

Hi, I wanted to buy a 1tb hard disk and was going through microdirect. I found the this hdd to be interesting http://www.microdirect.co.uk/Home/Pr...-Deskstar-SATA

When I was going through the specs on the right I found two data transfer rates mentioned - external as 300MBps and internal as 174MBps. Could anyone please tell me the difference and whether I should be bothered about it as I will be using the hard disk on a sharkoon quickport hard disk dock?

[Will404]

A deathstar

Maybe the speed that it communicates with the computer, 300MBPS (SATAII), meaning that cached files can be transfured at that speed, and the speed which it works internally - 174MBPS is the speed data can be transfured directly from the platters to the cache, or the computer.

Hope it helps

[arthurleung]

External is the rate that it communicates with the motherboard (system to/from cache)
Internal is the rate that the harddrive can read from the disk (disk to/from cache)

The external rate rarely matters unless it is USB or Firewire.