Printable View
It might just be me, but I aint sure, could someone clear this up for me plz....
IBM/Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 200GB 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-017-IB)
- Rotational Speed - 7200 RPM
- Interface standard - ATA-100
- Average seek time - 8.2 ms
Maxtor MaXLine Plus II Serial ATA 250GB 8MB Cache
They offer 7200 RPM spin speeds, 250GB capacity, 9.0 ms average seek time, a choice of Maxtor-developed Ultra ATA/133 or Serial ATA interfaces, an 8MB buffer
How come a ATA100 is faster than serial ATA?
thats seek time, and thats 25-Gb to look through, not 200Gb, its the speed it finds stuff, not transfer speed :)
Although i dunno the differance from ATA100 to SATA speeds
SATA is 150mb/s ATA100 is 100mb/s
Its once the drive finds what it wants to transfer (seek time) that the transfer speeds matter
drives rarely need more than 70mb/s.
but still, thats a damn good speed for a none serial dont ya think? Hmmm, by the look of it, its better to but a non serial ata for backup purposes??
Serial ATA is simply a new Interface that ALLOWS UP TO 150mb/s to pass down the wire. It Does NOT make the drive any Quicker whatsoever*. The speed you get will rely soley on the quality of the drive on the end of the cable. Modern drives top out around 70mb/s as silentdeath says.
The Major determinants of performance are
SEEK TIME - Obviously the lower the better, this will determine the latency and 'feel' of the drive. Has most effect when multiple small files are being read (ie bumming around windows and multitasking)
Seek time is determined by the rotational speed X the effiency of the internal mechanics X how close they have manged to squeeze the data tother on the drive, Hence why 7200 rpm drives all have *roughly* similar seek times as do 5400rpm drives etc/Look at the WD Raptor with a 10,000 rpm and you will see it has a ~4.8ms seek time. This drive is COOL.
Cache Size - The drive tries to predict what you are going to require next and pre-load it into the cache, ready for instant transfer. Obviously 8mb > 2mb = more guesses =more often right
*The only time the extra bandwidth of S-ATA is advantageous is when data is transferred directly from the cache. This is known as the BURST TRANSFER RATE
SIZE OF DISK- It is generally true that Bigger (250gb) drives are faster than the smaller ones (ie 80gb) because the data is squeezed closer together on the platters, meaning the reading head has less distance to travel between 'files' This reduces seek time and increases transfer rate.
-------------------------------
Transfer Rate - This has Less impact on performance than people think - it really only makes a difference when loading windows or the next level on max payne 2.
ATA 133 is patented and used only by Maxtor. It makes no difference exept to make adverts look nicer. It is a theoretical maximum that is never utilized.
At the End of the day i would recommend S-ATA simply because it's neater, Hot swappable has a future when you upgrade your mobo. The bastard is the price premium and that not all models in a line up support it.
The Best Hard Drive info on the planet
http://www.storagereview.com/
Check out their leaderboard - they recommend the Hitatchi deskstar.
Hope this has been usefull - it's not shakespeare cos i'm a scientist :)
easy now F
One major thing with seek time however is the size of the disk, the seek time on a 250GB is going to be larger than a 200gb disk etc etc.
There are ways of reducing this but its generally the larger the disk the larger the seek time. U320 SCSI can get down to about 5.2ms seek time even on the larger 147GB disks due to the 15K rpm spindle speed, and the controller.
TiG