Not knowing much at all about computers, I have a question about hard drives. I'm considering buying a second hard drive, and I have 512 MB DDR Ram installed in my Dell computer. The Ram is listed as PC 2100. I've seen hard drives advertised as 5400 rpm and PC 133. There is another advertised as 7200 rpm and PC 100. I'm thinking that the faster the rpm, the faster the hard drive, but I'm also thinking that the PC 100 is capable of transferring 100 MB per second, and the PC 133 goes at 133 MB per second. Is that right??? If so, and I had to choose one or the other of the ones mentioned, which one would I be better off with? Would there be a noticeable difference? More questions to follow.

Ed

Ed, you definitely want to go for the rpms. The other numbers refer to the bus speed, and it doesn't matter how fast the bus speed is, the CPU will always have to wait for the hard drive to find the data. The faster the drive spins, the faster it can pass the data to the bus.

Remember, the hard disk is a mechanical device.

Luck...

In speed terms about the blink of an eye Ed. I do usually get the faster option but I'm probably wasting my money which is better spent on Ram.

I have never heard hard drive bus speed referred to as "PC 100"...am I just out of touch? I always heard "Mode 5, Ultra ATA" etc... as referring to transfer speed. Do these two terms refer to the same thing?

I think we're talking apples and oranges here.

Ultra ATA-133 refers to the maximum hard disk data transfer rate of 133 Mbytes/sec. Look for the seek times in the spec. sheet. The lower the seek time the faster the hard drive.

PC-2100 refers to the ram theoretical transfer rate.

Thanks for the replies folks. Now I know what to look for. Greg, I told you I knew little about computers :). It was probably ATA 100, and ATA 133. (okay, what does "ATA" stand for?) Sorry for the mixup.

Ed

Two generalizations about hard drive speed (ie there are exceptions):

RPMs are directly proportional to noise. Slower drives are quieter.

RPMs are inversely proportional to reliability. Faster drives are much harder to keep cool, which means they have more early deaths.


I've used 10,000 rpm SCSI drives on my lab systems and found that they are noisy, and get very hot, even in a seperate case with extra fans. The new 15,000 rpm drives seem to be more of the same.

My own preference is for IBM 5400 rpm drives for the majority of my storage, since they run quiet and cool. If I had a bit more money, though I'd have one of the 15,000 rpm drives for a scratch disk...

--tks

Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA)

Also known as Ultra DMA, ATA is generally the least expensive hard drive interface; many computer motherboards include ATA controllers and cable connectors that typically control the "C" drive that contains the operating system.

Wow! Knowing something like that almost makes me a nerd! :D Thanks for the reply.

Ed

What do you hope to gain or do better or what problem(s) are you trying to solve?

The answers will affect shopping options.

At present time, I have a computer with a 40 gig hard drive (my main 'puter). I also have another with a 5 gig, and a 20 gig hard drive. I am now using my 20 gig drive (5400 rpm) for storage of images, etc. I would like to get another hard drive for my main computer to use for image storage and scratch disk (unless there's a problem with this), then use the 20 gig for backup.

Ed

One of the things I've found to make a huge difference from one drive to another is the amount of cache ram onboard. I think it's Maxtor that currently has a 7200rpm drive with 8meg of onboard ram. It has the suffix "jr" which stands for Jumbo Ram.

It's recently bumped IBM off the lists of at least two magazines editor's choice lists, due to ongoing problems with IBM reliability.

Ah, and I thought I knew what I needed to know! Thanks for the tip.

Ed

Doug, I believe that IBM has sold its storage division. So much for reliability. Too bad because for years IBM had the best hard drives out there.

I've moved into the Maxtor camp after a new IBM drive faded away on me.

I've always heard IBM drives had a rep for failures...

Doug - Is the onboard ram the same thing as "buffer size"? I'm trying to get all my terms right so I do not seem like a fool

We're getting way out of my tech comfort zone here, but I think cache and buffer size are two different things. Or not :)

A couple more questions:

1. What is the difference between a hard drive and a hard drive kit? I see both advertised, but I'm confused. Is it simply the fact that the kit comes with all the physical attachment hardware?

2. I've also become aware of the fact that the Bios on some computers have limitations on allowing the computer to recognize large hard drives. My computer is fairly new (Dell Dimension 4400). Is that something I should be concerned with?

3. If I buy a 60 gig hard drive, it will be enough to store image files and also use the drive as a scratch disk for Photoshop. If I do this, is there a need to make a partition, or somehow make part of the disk only available for the scratch disk?

Thanks,
Ed

As regards the 'kit' question I always assume it means an IDE/SCSI cable, power cable and possibly brackets so you can put the drive in a 5" bay if your pushed for space.

Ed - I'll try to answer a few of those... As long as your computer is fairly new and is running anything above Windows 95, you should not have a problem with large drives.

As far as the partitioning goes, that's exactly what I did with my second drive I just installed. During the installation process you should have an option to partition the drive. If you want to use part of it for Photoshop, I would highly recommend doing so. I have a 40gb drive and partitioned it into 10gb and 30gb areas. I use the 10gb area as the scratch disk and it seems to work very well.

Thanks Chris and Greg. That's what I was thinking too, but wasn't very sure about it.

Ed

You don't need to partition, but I always recommend partitioning, that way it's easier to seperate different kinds of data, also if you lose one of your partitions (hard drive problem or it somehow gets unintentionally deleted) you won't lose everything, just the partition. I always make at least a couple partitions: 1 for Windows (I don't install my programs in Program files or store my data in My documents, that way if I'm having a problem with windows i can reformat the partition and reload it without losing any of my programs or data), 1 for Programs, 1 (more for different kinds) for data, 1 for temp and scratch disk. If you don't want to spend a lot of money on something like PartitonMagic, there is a couple freeware programs out there, here's the links:
Ranish Partition Manager (http://www.ranish.com/part/)
Zeleps Partition Resizer (http://zeleps.com/)
If you are going to partition, first make sure you back up *everything* on the hard drive.

- David :)

P.S.
If you're new to partitioning, then it's probably a better idea to use PartitionMagic or something like it rather than Ranish partition manager since it's a lot harder to use and you need to know what you're doing (you could fairly easily really mess things up (like your MBR etc.) and end up not being able to boot up your sytem)

- David :)

Thanks David. A rookie like yours truly needs all the info he can get. :)

Ed