[Thunderer]

Hi, I would like to buy 2 hard drives of 500GB each and I do not what SATA, SATA2 and IBM mean cos they are described liked that. Also I would like to know whether it is worth it buying 7200rpm or 10000rpm.

Could any pls help and suggest what to buy with regards to the manufacturers.

[Spencer2004]

Originally Posted by Thunderer I do not what SATA, SATA2 and IBM mean cos they are described liked that.

ok first of all sata is what plugs the hdd to the motherboard and ibm is a company, what the....keep it polite please, thanks.

well anyway 10,000 rpm is very fast but very expensive, 72,000 rpm is slower but a hell of a lot cheaper. i really wouldn't bother about the make as they are more or less the same, its the specs that count.

im not sure that 500gb comes in the 10,000rpm flavors or if they do they will cost more than you pc its self. you only want 10,000 rpm if you want fast OS and game loading times but sata is an essential because its faster and dosent cost too much extra.

[Thunderer]

Ok. Not IBM (my mistake) but IDE.

[Spencer2004]

oh sorry

[alex]

I wouldn't put too much emphasis on the spindle speed of a hard drive, specifically between 7200 and 10000 rpm drives.

The spindle speed simply refers to the speed at which the shaft that the hard drive platters are mounted on rotates.

What you need to be looking at is the read speed, the write speed and the amount of data the drive stores on each platter.

WD Raptors (10000 rpm drives) have a low gb/platter count (I believe its 75gb for the X, at 150gb total) meaning, were this not a 10k rpm drive, software would take that much longer to load fully because it's spread out that much more on the platter. The spindle speed of the drive does offset this somewhat but it's not enough when compared to current 7200rpm drives.

The Samsung T166 500GB has 3 platters each capable, as the model number signifies, of storing upto 166gb onto each platter. This means that each segment is packed that much closer to it's neighbour meaning data can be loaded that much more quickly.

This isn't all of it though. There's also the read speed to take into account when choosing a drive. But to be honest it's much of a muchness now because all SATA2 drives have a read of around 8ms, so unless you're using your drive purely for gaming and are very (anally) concerned about loading times, and are also playing online or in a LAN, you're not really going to notice this.

All of the above is also dependent on keeping your drive defragged because ANY hdd will work faster when it's reading data sequentially rather than having to look at various area's of a platter for the next load segment of an application or game.