[Discussion] Selecting a hard drive

[Douglas Clark]

On Wed, 06 Jun 2007 07:41:11 -0400, bokeny at earthlink.net wrote:
>>If you have a spare PCI slot you don't have to replace your
>>motherboard.  Promise and others, I think, make PCI controllers for
>>SATA drives.  See the ChipList.txt in the danis506 documentation for a
>>list of controller chipsets that she supports.  OTOH, a new motherboard
>>would probably have a faster interface for the SATA controller than
>>PCI.

Remember there are two aspects for drive interface speed:

1) how fast the drive can transfer the data on and off the platter, This is measured 
in sustained transfer rate. Seek time is how fast the drive can find the data on the 
platter(s).

2) how fast the drive can transfer the data from the drive to the computer, i.e. 
transfer on the bus.

Unless the data is in the drive's cache, I believe the more important speed rating is 
the sustained transfer rate off of the platter. As long as the bus (ATA, SATA, 
SCSI, PCI) is faster than the sustained transfer rate, you are fine. And PCI should 
be faster than the sustained transfer rate.

Thanks

Douglas Clark