Introduction to hard drive technology

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/2007/03/12/introduction_to_hard_drive_technology/1.html

 

Hmmm very interesting news bite BUT it would have been useful to see which makes/model have good firmware/overall performance because as it states, they all look the same on paper.

Also, can NCQ actually be turned off?

 

Very interesting article, I didn't think that NCQ would actually be detrimental to my performance (when I get a system worth shouting about I hope I remember that)

On point of entirely flash based drives their relative speed/price/capacity will also have to out-do RAID setups, How long before Dell XPS (for example) has RAID as standard and you have to opt for a single disk

So it seems as ever RAID and defragmentation are the best way to have speedy HDD access and throughput.

Maybe with some manufacturers disk tools, maybe?

 

Aren't those cable lengths the wrong way round?

 

Nope: http://www.sata-io.org/esata.asp

 

I have a esata drive and quite frankly mobo manufacturers are crap at supporting it tbh. It really should just replace usb where it can, it's so nice to use in the OS

 

An interesting article, but I don't really feel any wiser should I need to select a new drive, or set of drives. I'll probably go for the lowest £ per Gb, maybe with a leaning towards Samsung because I like quiet, and hope for the best

I think a follow-on comparative review of a load of drives would be ideal.

 

I agree - and the title of the article seems to suggest this.

 

I was actually just thinking about this. At the end of the article you say enthusiasts store information such as the O/S installation and other important things on a faster 10k RPM drive and other "stuff" on a slower drive.

I was thinking of a setup like this for my upgrade I'm planning since I have everything on a 40GB drive which obviously...is not enough seeing as game sizes are increasing. GTA itself was what 4GB? Company of Heoroes 4 or is it 5GB, that's a quarter of my harddrive that has disappeared.

Anyway to my original question. How exactly do I setup my harddrive storage. What do I store on the faster drive and what on the slower.

Faster: OS

Slower: MP3's for when I'm listening while gaming it doesn't affect game harddrive access performance?
Movies *cough* pr0n.

Any suggestions? thanks

 

Not really. It says "an introduction to hard drive technology". Not "hard drive performance round up".

I think you lot are getting too used to reviews with lots of numbers rather than just informative discussions

 

Ah apologies, I didn't realise the cable lengths were referring to eSATA and xSATA - it reads like it's saying external SATA supports a cable length of up to 2m and internal SATA supports up to 8 meters.

 

No, "x" is like extended in server apps I'd imagine, rather than "e" for external.

 

When Hybrid Drives are the norm how will RAID setups use them (or won't they)

 

Great article, I agree though a 2nd part looking at drive performance based on these technologies would be very useful, in particular drive speed and platter size.

I'd love to see a feature on Raid as well.

 

Watch this space

 

Great article, very informative

 

This article is misnamed. It has a good overview of advanced hard drive technologies that can be hard to decipher if you are a novice, but is by no means an Introduction to Hard Drive Technology. It's also not up to par in the editing department (when compared to other Bit-Tech articles). I suggest another revision for the editing, and renaming the article.

For an introduction to hard drive technologies, I would expect terms such as IDE, PATA, SATA, ATA, ATA133, ATA100, SCSI, buffer, cache, RPM, response time, RAID (and 0, 1, 2, etc.), and Raptor to be quickly defined with user friendly descriptions. This would be a great article for Bit-Tech.net, as many users have no clue when it comes to hard drives and how their performance can affect every day tasks.

I usually don't comment on the articles, as they are 99% excellent, but my nerd-heart skipped a beat when I saw the hard drive article, and I expected to read up and be familiar with all the techie terms for hard drives afterwards - and it didn't deliver. Keep up the good work, though - this article just needs to be renamed and re-edited.

 

IDE's heading off into the world; with more and more "enthusiast" setups throwing it to the dogs, you'd have to have a sod's brain to bother buying drives on it new.

 

I wonder if I a hybrid drive could beat out my two raptors in raid 0?

 

Or an XBOX/older hardware as a NAS.