Hard Drive speeds??

[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?

[SkyDog]

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.

[nolekid86]

^^thats some good info there ^^

[skidooridr600]

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.

[bluesfusion]

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?

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

[jjyiz28]

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

[angomeka]

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.