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One more tidbit to consider will be that, even though they state 400mbs and ATA100 and ATA166 are supposed at a throughput of 66 MBs and 100 MBs respectively, these are usually burst mode speeds and hardly ever consistent transfer modes. HDDTach is a good program to measure actual throughput of a file transfer or file access. Even with 2GB files my ATA133 drives never peak at more than 40MB/s as measure by HDDtach. There many other factors to consider other than stated throughput. Overhead, file size, file defragmentation, caching, and others are factors to be considered when measuring the speed of a hard disk drive. The protocol or drive technology will also impact the speed that data gets transferred. It is always a good idea to check out a good review site and user comments about the HDD, since many HDD will sound similar on paper, but will be different on your desktop. Ofcourse, it is seldom a problem to have a wide path like an ATA100 or a SCSI Ultra-2 or a Firewire 800 drive since the max data path will be larger than others. But there are times I've seen ATA66 drive outperform an ATA100 drive in a head to head data transfer.
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July 30th, 2003, 05:40 PM
