Fastest PATA IDE drive?

[0iD]

Just to satisfy my curiosity, any one know the fastest Parallel ATA hard drive available? Anything to match my Raptors?

[oralpain]

Probably an 8mb cache hitachi 7k250. Not as fast as the raptors, but not much slower either.

[Furton]

I think the Maxtor drives with 16mb cache are the fastest.

[Butcher]

Nothing to stop them putting a raptor on PATA though, other than they like to fleece people for the extra for SATA.

[oralpain]

They have a larger cache, but in most cases are not faster.

Might have an edge in write performance.

Prices are rather similar, go with wich ever brand you prefer.

[Butcher]

Depends what you're doing really. Standard 7200RPM drives have similar maximum transfer speeds to faster spinning drives (mainly because the platters are larger). So for big sequential transfers it's much of a muchness. For random access faster spindle speed is better.

[oralpain]

Platter density also matters. Most recent 7,200rpm drives have 80+ GB platters, raptors only have 36.7GB platters.

Or maybe you ment physical size and density, in which case this post is redundant.

[0iD]

Well I've found a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250gb, Ata100 3.5lp 8ms 7200rpm 8mb with an 8ms seek time. Not too shabby

[arthurleung]

For highest data density, aka Highest Sequencial transfer rate (STR) I think the Seagate 7200.8 is the fastest.

Maxtor DM+10 = 100G/platter
Seagate 7200.8 400G = 133G/platter

Hitachi 7K400 (And the 7K500/T7K250 should be about as fast as the 7200.8)

[Furton]

Well I've found a Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250gb, Ata100 3.5lp 8ms 7200rpm 8mb with an 8ms seek time. Not too shabby

I've only found Komplett to stock them, is that where your getting it from?

[0iD]

E-buyer, but are currently out of stock, 7 days (allegedly). £91.51 inc Vat
*edit* Has to be said, Komplett are actually cheaper @£83 inc

Luckily, just 'mulling it over' atm.

[ikonia]

hmm I suppose drive speed and performance is all well and good, but it depends on the limitation and configuration of the bus you put it on.

no point having a 250000rpm 1 gig cache 80 gig ide drive, if you've got it set as a slave next to your primary ide disk for example

[0iD]

hmm I suppose drive speed and performance is all well and good, but it depends on the limitation and configuration of the bus you put it on.

no point having a 250000rpm 1 gig cache 80 gig ide drive, if you've got it set as a slave next to your primary ide disk for example

Proposing running two (maybe another two @ later date) off a Promise TX200 raid card in a 'possible' new home server.

[Butcher]

Platter density also matters. Most recent 7,200rpm drives have 80+ GB platters, raptors only have 36.7GB platters.

Or maybe you ment physical size and density, in which case this post is redundant.

Yeah I meant physical size - the platters in a 7200 rpm disk are typically about 3" diameter so fill more or less the whole drive cavity. Faster drives use smaller platters which are more stable at high speeds, and also it helps reduce seek times as the actuator has less distance to move.

hmm I suppose drive speed and performance is all well and good, but it depends on the limitation and configuration of the bus you put it on

You'll be hard put to max out any bus you put a modern drive on, unless you put a LOT of drives on one bus. You're typically looking at up to 60-80 MB/s maximum, you can stick two of them on PATA-133 and not really max it out. Of course if you want to have a lot of disks with high performance from all at once you're basically going to have to go scsi, a dual channel controller running at 320MB/s per channel smokes anything else out there really.