Hard Drive - Worlds Quickest?

Inquitus

What is the worlds fastest HD in the following catagories.

IDE
SATA
SCSI

I am presuming that the WD Raptor is the quickest in the SATA catagory, or can some of the 7200RPM 16MB NCQ HD's give it a run for it's money?

Am in the market for a new HD or 2, and want the fastest available, obviously within reason......which probably rules out the SCSI route, unless I just buy a small one and a controller to use as the boot drive.

Thoughts and advice pls.

Inqui

Praetorian

The WD Raptor is fantastic. It is reliable, quiet and blisteringly quick; an ideal boot drive. Active cooling is a necessity in my opinion. I hope WD release an updated Raptor soon; a 150 gig with 10-20% better performance would be nice...

I wouldn't bother with IDE drives anymore.

You can get faster scsi business class drives, and some of them are actually reasonably priced, but only if you already have a controller. NB Controllers are expensive.

tba

Praetorian wrote:

I wouldn't bother with IDE drives anymore.

I'll take them of you in that case, they make great drives for my file server all dasiychained together like a necklace of gigabyte glory.

blorg

Are there _major_ performance differences between the 7200 RPM IDE drives for sale by Komplett? Or are all the ones with 8mb+ cache more or less the same?

jozi

What about SATA1 v SATA2?
Is there much of a performance gain?

Gilgamesh

tbh the fastest HDD available imho are still the 15k Seagate Cheetahs

K.O.Kiki

The 250Gb SATA II w/NCQ models from WD & Samsung outperform a Raptor at many if not most tests.
Best choice would be a Samsung SATA II SpinPoint 120S 250Gb harddrive.

Crap, I'm starting to sound like a Samsung salesperson :eek:

po0k

jozi wrote:

What about SATA1 v SATA2?
Is there much of a performance gain?

No such thing as SATA2.

There is SATA150 and SATA300. The latter is SATA running at twice the speed with some extra features like NCQ and (afaik) mandatory hot-swap support.

SolarNexus

SyxPak wrote:

No such thing as SATA2.

There is SATA150 and SATA300. The latter is SATA running at twice the speed with some extra features like NCQ and (afaik) mandatory hot-swap support.

SATA2 does exist, but only theoretically. It has not yet been adopted, and probably will never be, or at least not for a good long time yet.

As for this idea that SATA is inherantly faster than IDE is complete bull. IDE and SATA are the same speed; though it is true that SATA has a maximum throughput of 150mb p/s no drives support this yet, and furthermore, most drives are running at the same speed anyhow 5400RPM to 7200RPM. In my experience, you wont find many (if any) faster than 7200RPM which arent SCSI.

I'll ask the question nobody else bothers to - why do you need "the fastest available hdd" ?

Khannie

SyxPak wrote:

No such thing as SATA2.

There is SATA150 and SATA300.

Ah come on now. SATA300 is called SATA2 everywhere. Or were you taking the peepee?

Rollo Tamasi

what about the h/d that run at 100000rpm instead of the standard 72000rpm, surely they are faster?

Gone West

would the 15k 36 gig SCSI drives not be faster?
theyre not consumer drives, but they're still out there.

Khannie

Rollo Tamasi wrote:

what about the h/d that run at 100000rpm instead of the standard 72000rpm, surely they are faster?

Yes, the WD Raptor is very very very fast. It's also very expensive per gigabyte compared to other drives.