Hard Drive information

I have to put together a list of facts and tips about all the different kinds of hard drives there are. ie rpm speed, size, cache, different types (ide, sata, scsi, sas, fiber) and its kinda hard to find factual information that i can use so i thought id ask you guys :)

What are the various speeds of RPM's that they come in? I know theres 5400, 7200, 10000 and 15000 but i'm not sure what else.

Are there any other types of HDD interfaces?

What does the cache do?

Buffer time?

etc...any info will be greatly appreciated

There's actually a stick at the top of this forum called "Determining Hard Drive Performance" written by a complete genius (;)) which should answer some of your questions.
http://www.sharkyforums.com/showthread.php?t=268718

You have a lot of the information already above. Your list of hard drive interfaces and spindle speeds is complete.

To answer your question about cache, it's like short term memory (RAM) on the hard drive to help with the latency associated with hard drives. Hard drives are so much slower than the rest of your system that every time your system needs to access the hard drive it comes to a screeching halt (in computer time at least), so the cache tries to prevent that allowing the system to write to high speed cache which in turn writes to the drive on it's own time.

i saw the sticky after i posted this, thanks.

oh and you missed one of the spindle speeds like i did....4200rpm :P:D

Right, right. Always forget the pesky laptop drives.