|
Basically, spindle speed plus cache (buffer) will determine performance. Make sure you are using a high UDMA transfer mode so that your performance is not bottlenecked. You can compare speed by looking at the average latency and seek time. But the most important is transfer rates, specifically sustained transfer rates.
As for transfer rates, there are two common ones. There is the burst (interface) transfer rate, which is essentially not important at all. Then there is the big one, the average sustained transfer rate, which is what matters. This is how fast your hard drive can sustain a transfer. It is almost never bottlenecked by the interface, both in IDE and SATA, which is why burst or interface speed is meaningless.
Those are the basics. Take a look at the hard drive scores thread at the top for info on benchmarking.
|