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What You Should Know Before Buying a New Hard Drive::

The ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) interface is the most used interface to connect hard drives to PCs, and the ATA interface has been upgraded along the way, but new iterations are compatible with older technology and this makes it susceptible to bottlenecks. The number at the end of an ATA rating corresponds to the interface's maximum throughput. ATA33, for example, has a maximum of 33MBpS (Mega Bytes per second), ATA100 a maximum of 100MBpS, and so on. This is also true for the SATA (Serial ATA) interface SATA I SATA150 or SATA II SATA300, or SATA III SATA600 has a maximum burst of 150MBpS and 300MBpS, and 600MBpS respectively.

When choosing a new hard drive keep these factors in mind. (Rated in order of importance)

1). The faster the interface the better. SATA III, watch for maintained transfer speed vs. burst speed.

2). Rotational speed is the next most important factor. A 7200 RPM drive will increase transfer speed, and decrease latency.

3). Average Random Seek time (The time it takes the head to get into physical position to read/write data)  and Latency time (Latency is the time it takes the platter to rotate into position after a seek). The lower the better (Note: most SSD have seek times of .1uS.

4). Lastly, a bigger cache will increase the burst speed.

5). Remember most new drives are reverse compatible. So if you have the option of buying a SATA II or SATA III drive, and you have an SATA II controller, you should opt for the SATA III drive. You can always upgrade the controller at a later date.

You might think that buying a faster drive will increase the speed of the system, well it's not quit that simple. The problem is that the throughput will only be as fast as the slowest link in the chain. If you take an SATA300 drive and hook it up to your Dual CPU 3.6GHz desktop's SATA150 interface, your system will read and write to that drive, but the process will be limited by the controllers slower rate. Likewise, if you connect an SATA300 drive to a motherboard only capable of SATA150, the drive will only transfer data at a maximum speed of 150MBps. Also, remember that these ratings are the 'Burst' rate, not the sustained data transfer rates which are around 1/3rd slower then the burst rate.

Below you will find a real world Disk Interface - Drive Size - Transfer Time chart. These results are our own test results from the best equipment we could find in the particular scope of the hardware in question. *Note: Some of the ATA disk size are not applicable, they are only for reference.

If you are thinking of purchasing a hard drive here is a good place to start: SATA II, SATA III

In the example above upgrading from a 7,200 RPM SATA I drive to a 7,200 RPM SATA III drive you should expect to see about a 217% increase in overall performance. So what are the total limiting factors in achieving maximum throughput in the system you might ask?

 Well there are a number of factors to consider. CPU speed, BUS bandwidth, Controller burst speed (Burst speeds are not sustainable speeds over the entirety of the disk), Rotational speed of the platter, Cache size, and last but not least file system specification i.e. FAT32, NTFS. Seek speed or overhead is generally nullified by increases in the onboard cache.

CPU speed as a factor in hard drive performance is a principle of its prefetch cache. This either hinders or helps data arriving on the BUS to become synchronized with data leaving the BUS. The bigger the cache and the faster the CPU speed generally speaking, the better (faster) data can come and go to and from the drive for processing.

The BUS bottleneck, however one thing to check and the most forgotten setting is the Transfer Speed setting. Make sure that the drive is setup to use UDMA (Direct Memory Access) as this enables a hardware interface channel between the RAM and Controller. Changing the transfer mode to UDMA can increase to performance of the throughput by as much as 60% (Depending on the current setting).

Controller burst speed, is just that burst, the drive can get loaded up as data is read and written and is not a very accurate representation of actual performance. On our test bench we have seen decreases in the order of 30% throughout the entire sweep of the drive. This number can be subjective, as other factors namely the drives onboard cache affects the loading. As long as all other things are equal i.e. drive speed matches controller interface speed all is well.

Rotational speed of the platter, drives usually run at 5,400, 7,200, or 10,000 RPM while SCSI drives commonly run at 7,200, 10,000, or 15,000 RPM. We will not cover the SCSI interface here, but note that the SATA specifications are now very close to that of the SCSI interface and can be said to be statistically identical, at least for our purposes. On our test system we setup two nearly identical 250GB drives, one 7,200 RPM and one 10,000 RPM, we observed an average increase of 6%. Drives that rotate faster perform faster, particularly during disk-intensive tasks, however they are louder and run hotter. Thus, a 10,000 RPM drive requires extra cooling fans and the whole system should be located away from the user. Liquid cooled and liquid bearing drives are a nice solution to the noise problem. Remember that cooler drives will not last longer then hotter drives, most drives actually like to run a bit hotter and will last longer if they are running a bit hot.

Cache size, is a factor that can increase drive performance. On our test system we tested  commonly used hard drives with cache sizes of, 2MB, 8MB, 16MB, and 32MB. As would be expected, the drive with 32MB cache performed better then any of the others, with an average increase of 5% between each of the 2MB, 8MB, 16MB and an addition 5% increase between the 16MB and 32MB caches.

The File System used can affect the access rate and cache loading. This can be particularly noticeable when using the system with disk-intensive tasks like manipulation of multimedia content. This is a principle of the file system granularity commonly referred to as cluster size. That is the minimum allocation unit on the drive. Below is a list of common drive sizes, file system types, and the associated default cluster sizes.

*While Windows XP can mount FAT32 volumes larger then 32GB some programs might not be able to see the extra space. In particular to this is the Windows setup program itself which if needed for an in-place upgrade or repair console can certainly be a problem.

Generally speaking, the larger the cluster size the faster the data can be accessed; however when reading smaller files repeatedly the cache can become loaded. There is no one right choice when it comes to choosing a cluster size. Unless you are a hardcore media junkie, then the defaults will most likely suit your needs just fine. It is really a matter of trial and error when you veer from the list above. Note that in general that NTFS is the better of the file systems. NTFS will not fragment as fast, it offers average seek time, it will not load down the drive chain caches, and drive size can be anything up to 2TB when using MBR or 256TB when using GPT. If you are tweaking for multimedia and have a dedicated drive then you might try FAT32 with 64KB cluster size. Please remember that you should defragment your drives often, we would recommend defragmenting the hard drive at boot time before the operating system starts.

Before defragmenting the drive remove the pagefile from the drive and close as many applications as possible, especially server databases like SQL servers.

When all is said and done; if you now have a ATA33, ATA66, ATA100/133 drive and a SATA II motherboard, there are very good reasons to upgrade to a faster drive, if you are running out of space as well then upgrade now. If on the other hand you currently have a SATA 7,200 RPM drive and a SATA II or III motherboard and space is not an issue (1TB) you may want to wait to upgrade, unless you are willing to spend the money to get into a 64-Bit MB with multiple core CPUs, and the SATA III interface (Side note: The 18" cable length limit with the ATA 'Standard 40Pin and 80Pin cables' has been increased to 1m or 3.3' in the SATA specification. These round cables also help with airflow in the system and can be routed more easily in bigger tower systems).