[Monkey]

I was just curious if anyone knows if any Hard Drive makers will be increasing the speeds of IDE hard drives above 7200rpm, if possible?

 

[mcgeeb1215]

I don't know about rpm, but I was just at Circuit City browsing the hard drives and saw they have some new improved hard drives. I don't know what brand it was but they were 180 gb hard drives and they have a larger cache on them (8k) I believe. It says on the box thats 4 times larger than other hard drives. That could be cool!!!! I've read in books of 10000rpm being the max, but that something like that may require fans to keep cooler. Hmmm?!!

 

[Monkey]

We'll I know that SCSI hard drives have speeds of 10,000rpm and 15,000rpm but I don't know much about SCSI devices and compatiblity. I checked out that hard drive on their website, $370 very expensive. Have you seen higher cache sizes on hard drives with a smaller capacity?

 

[merlin]

IBM Ultrastar 9LZX 9.1 Gig 10, 020 RPM with 4.0MB buffer average seek time 5.3ms....sigh....

 

[johnwill]

Merlin, time for some remedial reading. The drive you mention does not come in the IDE interface. From the IBM website:

Interfaces include Ultra2 SCSI LVD (fast, wide, SCA II), Serial Storage Architecture (SSA), and Fibre Channel Arbitrated Loop (FCAL).

 

[mcgeeb1215]

I'm sorry, it was 8mb cache on the newer hard drives. I believe it was on the 80 and 180gb hard drives.

 

[johnwill]

I have a WD 120gig drive with the 8mb cache, it's a nice drive, but hard to tell if it's any faster than the other 7200 RPM drives here. The speed champ is the 10k RPM Ultra-160 SCSI drive that I boot from on this system.

 

[Monkey]

Do you need to do something special to have SCSI devices or a motherboard that uses them. I don't know anything about SCSI hard drives and other SCSI devices. I stay away from them, the prices seem to be higher.

 

[johnwill]

You don't need anything special for SCSI drives, if your MB supports them with a decent host adapter, you'll get the maximum performance from the fast SCSI interface. OTOH, they are more expensive, so you pays your money and takes your choice.

 

[Monkey]

ok, thanks.