Hard Drive speeds??

I was wondering what to look for to find a good hard drive? Also, on average, what speeds to hard drives transfer at? Like 20megs/sec or what?

As far as I know, the only specs you'll see when hard drive shopping are seek time, rotational speed, interface speed, and buffer size.

Rotational Speed: The higher, the better. A drive whose platters spin at 7200 RPM is faster than 5400.

Interface Speed: Again, the higher, the better. ATA-133 means a theoretical burst maximum of 133 MB/s, while ATA-100 maxes out at 100 MB/s. In practical applications, though, there's not much difference between ATA-100 & 133 since the drives aren't physically capable of sustaining that kind of transfer speed. (If you buy a drive that uses a higher or lower ATA spec than your IDE controller is rated at, it'll run at the fastest speed that both can handle.)

Seek Time: This is a measurement of the average amount of time it takes a drive to locate and start reading data, measured in milliseconds. Lower times are better.

Buffer Size: Most current hard drives have a 2 MB RAM buffer, but there are a few out there with larger buffers, like the Western Digital "Special Edition" drives with 8 MB buffers. A larger buffer can add some speed when your system needs to read the same data repeatedly.

^^thats some good info there :D ^^

Thanks a ton for the info!!

I was also wondering how long would it take to transfer like 60 gigs of data to another hard drive if mine is a 7200rpm ata100, and the other guys is faster than mine. It would also be on a pci ide controller if that matters.

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Originally posted by skidooridr600
I was wondering what to look for to find a good hard drive? Also, on average, what speeds to hard drives transfer at? Like 20megs/sec or what?

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You want a ATA-133 drive running at 7200 rpm and less than 9ms seek.
This is standard for most drives these days.

areal density, how much sectors you have per track. how closely data you could fit in a given space. adding this along with the rotational speed will give you the average media transfer rate. 40mb/sec is very good. in the 30mb/sec is average.

since the an ide drive in maximum trasnfer rate is around 60mb/sec, getting ata100 or 133 will not matter, but only matter for the buffer, which runs at the interface speed (133 or 100 etc...)

seek time: most are in the 9's so it doesn't really matter much

I know there is a WD hd that is 80gb 7,200, 4mb cashe, and i cant remember the rest of the stats on it but make sure you mobo can handle a ATA 133 if not you wont get passed ATA100.