Hard Drives
You won’t get very far these days without a sizeable hard
drive. A hard drive is one of the key
components in a computer system in that it represents a data bottleneck. The tradeoff between being able to store
lots of information (permanently) is that this ’physical’ system of plates and scanning
heads is about 60,000 times slower than RAM storage. However, the hard drive is where all the data in your system is
stored. The operating system, all of
your programs, and your music/movies are all housed in the hard drive.
Back in the day, I remember having a 100 MB hard drive was a
big deal. Now, 100 GB is the standard,
which represents a 10x jump in size requirement over a decade. Considering that the average game is about
700 MB to 4 GB in size, and that applications and downloads can slowly chip
away at your hard drive, having a big one in excess of 60 GB is definitely a
good idea. But wait! Size isn’t the only thing that matters
here. Other specs like RPM speed,
buffer size, and transfer rate define how well the hard drive will perform,
regardless of how big it is. The higher
the RPM, the faster you will be able to transfer data and seek programs. Most hard disks these days are rated at 7200
RPM, but there are some out there that go even faster (but they’re more
expensive). When it comes to buffer
sizes and transfer speeds, let’s consider the three industry standards for personal
computing:
Old School IDE: the Regular ATA Drive
All computers come with support for a regular IDE
drive. These are the most common hard
drives with the flat ribbon cable data connector. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be using one of these unless
you’re a performance nut. IDE drives
come in different flavors of transfer rate.
The specs that define an IDE drive are the UDMA rating and its buffer
size. The UDMA rating lists the drive’s
transfer speed. Most modern
motherboards can support UDMA 133, which can handle 133 MB/s of data transfer. Furthermore, the buffer size for IDE drives
is either 2 MB or 8 MB. It’s been found
by many benchmarkers around the world that a regular IDE hard drive with 8 MB
buffer is competitive to the other higher-end models in performance, but comparatively
cheaper.
S-ATA: Next Generation
A new standard developed by over 80 companies is the
serial-ATA drive, known as SATA. This
new standard promises easier installation and configuration, along with
transfer rates up to 150 MB/s.
Considering that UDMA 133 drives with 8 MB buffers can come close to
these specifications, there’s no real point in getting a SATA drive right now
because you won’t be able to mix the two types within the same system.
IDE-RAID
Once a niche market for servers, the Redundant Array of
Independent Disks (RAID) was an old standard created to allow servers to
connect many smaller hard drives to form a single large storage space. Transfer rates for RAID are incredibly fast
because two or more hard disks are used at the same time for the exact same
operation. If you want a RAID setup,
you’ll have to buy a RAID controller.
They’re not that expensive though, and if you want to hook up two 120 GB
IDE drives to a cheap RAID controller it won’t run you more than $400. However, I’m a bit suspicious of why you’d
ever need this. Considering that a 160
GB hard drive with an 8 MB cache goes for a quarter of this price, I’m hard
pressed to figure out why you’d need such high storage amounts and transfer
speeds. Unless you’re doing a lot of
crazy stuff like ripping and encoding DVD movies, there’s just no need for
these kinds of numbers!
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