Spin speeds and buffers, connecting hard drives
Spin Speeds Buffers Connecting Hard Drives
Older motherboards supported ATA33/66 the newer motherboards and hard drives support ATA100/133 this basically means the rate of peak data transmission per clock cycle (burst rate). So if your hard drive is ATA100 it has a theoretical burst rate of 100mbps.
For the majority of users this type of thing does not matter, the main point are that you are aware of the different options and can relate the information to the indicators on the hard drive casing or the motherboard manual.
Another value which is referred to is the speed of the actual drive. Older drives were typically 5400RPM newer versions were introduced and the default standard is now 7200RPM this means the amount of revolutions per minute. Faster drives using SCSI or SATA can reach speeds over 10000RPM when comparing drives you should look for the seek and access times this are measure in milliseconds and tell you how fast they can access or write data to or from the drive.
A drives buffer is an amount of memory (RAM) built-in to the drive which is used to store data that is accessed frequently. The larger the buffer the more data that can be stored which reduces the operations which take longer to be read and then wrote from the drive. The default buffer size is 2MB although many makers have increased this to 8MB and no doubt this will increase as the drive market continues to increase in capacity and performance.
Here soon.
