Price Guides November 2004: Optical and Magnetic Storage
by Adam Rader on November 6, 2004 12:00 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Hard Drives: Parallel ATA
One of the most often overlooked components of a system is the hard drive. Choosing a good hard drive can make the difference between long and short system start-ups and having to wait ages for your favorite game to load, among other things. While not too much has changed in HDD technology over even the last two or three years, there are some things to look for if your next drive is going to be of the parallel ATA variety.There are three main factors that contribute to the overall speediness of any modern hard drive. Platter density, cache, and rotation speed. In the right combination, these attributes can come together to make for a fairly fast hard drive. Granted, it will never have a seek time like SCSI, or some of the better SATA drives, but it is certainly more than enough for the average user. Out of these factors, we recommend going with a 7200RPM drive with 8MB of cache. The platter density is really a matter of what kind of capacity you really need, but in most cases, the more, the better.
One model that has been showing up a lot in sales at some major retailers is the Maxtor ATA100 160GB 7200RPM 8MB drive. Sporting everything that we look for in a basic hard drive, it also has a FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearing) motor, which helps quite a bit to keep noise to a minimum. The really good news is that this drive is priced right around the 50 cents per gigabyte mark that we all know and love. A lot of other manufacturers are coming almost as close to the sweet spot as Maxtor and will likely match them in due time.
While SATA is starting to become more commonplace, we don't see PATA disappearing anytime soon, so there's really no reason to choose one over the other just yet, aside from neater cabling and airflow.
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bofkentucky - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
I was pointing out an obvious error in the price guide, not commenting on your high performance SATA rant. And kogase is right, everyone else has a lucrative SCSI market to protect. WD needs a more dense solution tough, 74GB is getting tight in an age of HomePVR's and HD Video.Gnoad - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
and that would be a scsi drive, which doesn't interest the normal consumer too much. I was talking about sata drives.bofkentucky - Monday, November 8, 2004 - link
Seagate Ultra320 146GB 10000RPM 8MB for 159.99I don't think so
Live - Sunday, November 7, 2004 - link
The Samsung drive exists in 2 versions one with a very good motor with low noise and heat as a result. But lately the have started to use a different and louder motor on at least some of there drives. They are named the same so no way telling the differences by the name of the drive you have to check the actual printing on the drive.mongoosesRawesome - Sunday, November 7, 2004 - link
No mention of the fact that SATA drives can limit your OC. That would be my main reason to stay with PATA. I wouldn't mind seeing this phenomenon investigated in an article...drifter106 - Sunday, November 7, 2004 - link
kogase - Saturday, November 6, 2004 - link
I think it has something to do with the fact that those companies have high performance SCSI lines, and don't want to throw away their investment in that field with a similar performing SATA drive.Gnoad - Saturday, November 6, 2004 - link
Very good article. It seems nobody is really trying to compete with the Raptor drives. Maxtor tried with 16mb cache, but what we really need is more 10k drives. I figured we would be seeing other drives like the raptors within months after they were released. Why aren't seagate, maxtor, samsung going with 10k drives? Are they just giving the high end market to WD?