What are the differences between Hard Drives?

[Canadianmonster]

I'm planning to upgrade my computer soon, and have been leaning towards upgrading my hard drive. I was wonder what is the difference between SATA and EIDE? I thought EIDE was the better very for a more stable system, but in alot of posts I see people saying SATA is better, which has put my entire value system for hard drives in limbo. Also what is the advantage of have a large buffer, and what is the biggest rpm a hard drive can handle at this time.

[Doppelganger]

this is how home computer drives stand as of now:
speeds of 5400, 7200, or 10k rpm, 7200 being most common, 10k as fastest (though most are just fixed up server drives and therefore <40 most of the time), 5400 is cheapest
there are 4 different controllers out there, ata-66 (very old and hard to find), ata-100, ata-133, and sata (serial ata). the order of speed is ata-66 at slowest with sata as fastest.

ide normally is just a connection type used by hdd and opical drives (thick ribbon).

the 2/4/8 mb cache is just a chunck of memory that stores information before it is written/read to/from drive. having more of it allows you to append more and bigger files to write/read and boost proformance (not quite sure how to explain)


if you want best price, go for an ata-100, 5400 rpm drive, for proformance, 10k sata (raid 0 is good, increase speeds even more), for something useful but affordable, go ata-133 w/ 7200 rpm (with 8 mb cache is better than normal 2).

as for sizes, internal drives come in 20, 30, 36 (10k drives mainly), 40, 60, 74 (10k drives again, though these are very expensive and not for value comps), 80, 120, 160, 200, and 250 (maybe 300 too, but i haven't checked up on drives lately)


if you already have an sata controller, buy a 7200 rpm hdd with 8mb cache, but if you don't, you'll just waste a pci port getting one.

[Sk0pe]

I bought a 120 GB drive for only $70 or so from Best Buy, after rebates of course.

It's worth it!

From experience and from what I've heard, Seagate is the way to go with HDDs.

[Doppelganger]

seagate, maxtor, samsung, toshiba, all these are good hdd that you can get a 160 gig hdd for less than $1 per gig..