dojharris

looking for a nice simple chart to exlain whats specifactions you should be looking for in a hard drive,,, like,,,, Buffer Size,,,, Seek Time,,,, Track-to-Track Seek Time,,,,,Average Latency,,,, Spindle Speed ,,,,Interface Transfer Rate,,,,,, think i got it correct but keep forgetting,,,,, Buffer size higher MB the better,,,,,,Seek Time lower ms the better,,,, Track-to-Track Seek Time lower the better ms ,,,,,,, Spindle Speed higher the rpm the better ,,,,Interface Transfer Rate the higher mps the better,,, and i am not sure about Average Latency i would think lower the better,,,,, thanks for your time,,,,, DOJ HARRIS <<<<

TheMatt

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.