ATA & RPM Question...

I'm lookin at upgrading my HD and I have a question about a couple of HD's I saw.

Which of these two harddrives is better?

01. 40GB ATA100 5400RPM

02. 40GB ATA66 7200RPM

You mean which is faster.

In my opinion the first one, as long as it is connected to an ATA100 controller.

I disagree there. Since drives for the most part still have not really even stressed ATA66 specs yet (heck they are only getting sequential transfer rates a little over 45-50megs/s). The only you are going to see a performance advantage of an ata 100 drive is on burst speed. With a higher spindle speed you are going to have higher transfer rates and should have a lower seek time. Also your buffer tends to be larger on 7200rpm drives.

[quote]Originally posted by lysergic:
<strong>I disagree there. ...going to see a performance advantage of an ata 100 drive is on burst speed. ..</strong><hr></blockquote>

They (100 ata)are generally 'quicker' because of those big fat caches that drives have now, how many dll's fit in 4 or 8 meg?, but for through put both are capable of 'maxing out' the PCI bus.

Seek time isn't just down to spin speed.

I'd buy a 7200 rpm ata 100 drive... :p

You would probably get a shorter seek and random read/write time on the 7200rpm drive so in general use, the 7200 would probably be faster. If you do alot of large file transfers, go with the higher throughput of the ATA100 drive.

JM2¢

this harddrive is going to be used in my fileserver.

i know that a 7200 ata100 would be better but the place i'm buying the other hardware for my fileserver only have those two kinds of harddrives.

for a fileserver, which i would guess you will have a large amount of small file transfers, i would get the drive with the fastest seek time. this may well be the 7,200 rpm drive, but check with the supplier.

assuming you have ata 100 support, why don't you cut your options and get a 40 gig, udma 100, 7200 rpm, or even future proof yourself with a udma 133, not a lot of difference in price on any of them...

7200 all the way unless cost is a big factor...which shouldn't be :D

definatly the 7200. 2 megs of cache is not a lot, so it doesn't really matter if the 5400 bursts data faster. it is more important when the drive needs to find 300 megs of word files or windows files or whatever, and this is where the 7200 is faster. it doesn't matter that the ata100 _can_ send data faster, becasue it will be still searching while the 7200 drive has already found the data and sent it.

Most reatil boxed HDD are 7200 ata100 regardless of whats on the box. Sometimes they even come with larger capacities than what is listed (this happens more with the lower end 20GB models).

Well guys, I ended up getting a 40GB 7200RPM ATA133 Maxtor. Being that my motherboard is ATA100, I purchased a Promise PCI ATA/133 IDE Controller to take advantage of the ATA133.

And at a pretty sweet deal!!!

Thanks for everyone's input!!!