what you need to consider when buying harddisk ?

Question

i saw in the list, there are rotation speed (e.g. 7200 rpm), interface (e.g. ATA 133) and cache (e.g. 8 mb)

how do we know what these are? i know the rotation speed, but what about interface and cache...?

could you provide me with good website about where i can find a tutor about this things?

thx a lot =)

Answer 1

Rotation = The speed of the disk spining.

Interface = There are two interfaces (ATA and SATA) ATA used to hav a bigger jack 41 pin. Sata hav 8 pins and looks samller and seriously faster than ATA.

Cache = Is tempory space for files to be processed. More is better

Neo

Answer 2

Well, you've already got some understanding of drives - rotation speed is one of the big parameters when considering a new hard drive. Your standard speeds are:
7500;
10,000; and
15,000

Interfaces are:
EIDE - probably the oldest technology of hard drives still available to buy new. These come in varying throughput speeds of ATA 33, 66, 100 and 133 Mb/sec.

Serial ATA (SATA) - a much newer technology which uses a different bus type to allow throughput speeds of 150mb/sec (SATA-1) and 300mb/sec (SATA-2 or SATA II).

SCSI - An older technology that has survived by being flexible and useful. SCSI drives reached much faster throughput speeds before IDE and EIDE drives were able to. Ultra-320 SCSI have been around for a few years and provide 320mb/sec throughput.

SAS - the merging of SATA and SCSI technologies. It's new, it's fast - 300mb/sec per direction (read/write in duplex).

But the big question is what can your computer support? You can probably put any one of these types of drives in your system, but you might have to buy a controller card to go with it.

Here's a good site for a breakdown:
IDE, EIDE, ATA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_Drive_Electronics
Serial ATA - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ata
SCSI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scsi

Answer 3

as u said rotation speed, size, interface and cache are the keys to consider when buying a hd

join some computer forum and ask those gurus about how to choose HD
or search in yahoo : how to choose a
for normal user 7200rpm is good enough unless u are a serioud gamer then go for 10000rpm

interface: IDE or SATA is almost the same , if u wanna always backup ur data then go for SATA

cache: higher then better now 16mb cacha available get that

Answer 4

There is a decent overveiew in this article: http://www.pcworld.com/howto/bguide/0,guid,20,page,3,00.asp#

The interface is the first thing to consider. Your hardware setup in the box you are adding or replacing a drive will define this. If you are replacing a SCSI drive, you will want the same.

Capacity (200GB) has to do with the amount of storage the drive offers.

The other specs (seek time, data cache, etc) have to do with how fast you can get data stored or retreived, compared to other drives.

Answer 5

check the rpm and cache
and you can use SATA instead of ATA drive for more speed

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-sata-or-serial-ata.htm

http://www.storagereview.com/map/lm.cgi/buffer

Answer 6

i think the higher the speed the better

Answer 7

from this question i konw a good website:www.wisegeek.com