Grex Hardware Conference

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Grex Hardware Item 189: Hard Disk Drives
Entered by ball on Thu Aug 10 00:54:42 UTC 2006:

Today I've been thinking about disk drives.  I would love to
buy a matched pair of 10k rpm SCSI drives because they're so
fast.  I'm sure they'd make a machine feel much faster,
especially once the RAM started to fill up, but they're so
expensive that it's not going to happen ($2.80/Gb Vs $0.38/
Gb for SATA).

Looking at the Spec. sheets, even basic 5,400 rpm ATA drives
are much faster than anything I'm running now.  I'd thought
about getting 5,400 rpm because they used to be quieter,
cooler and less thirsty than 7,200 rpm drives.  These days
there's not much in it.

With today's drives, SATA isn't significantly faster than
parallel ATA, but I envisage PATA going the way of ST-506/
MFM eventually. PATA would work with my existing mainboards,
but SATA would move more easily to a new machine.  In theory
I could shove an SATA card into a PCI expansion slot, but
then my PCI bus gets choked with data that ordinarily (in
any decent mainboard) bypasses it. I'm not sure what to buy.

4 responses total.

#1 of 4 by gull on Thu Aug 10 16:52:11 2006:

Even 10k drives are now quieter than 5400 rpm drives used to be, in my 
experience.  Most modern 7200 rpm drives are extremely quiet -- the 
noise is way below the noise floor created by the power supply and CPU 
fans.  The annoying high-pitched whine I remember from my 5400 rpm 
drives is basically gone.  10k drives need more cooling, though.  
There's only so much that can be done about that -- at that speed a 
significant amount of heat is coming from aerodynamic friction.

#2 of 4 by ball on Thu Aug 10 18:43:21 2006:

If I won the lotto I'd buy a Cremax Icydock.:-)  Yesterday I
was looking at specs and the 7,200 RPM drive was actually
slightly quieter than its 5,400 RPM counterpart, perhaps
because of newer technology.  The 7,200 RPM drive was a
little more thirsty and it may run warmer too.

#3 of 4 by gull on Wed Aug 23 21:28:28 2006:

Pretty much all the wattage that goes into the drive comes out as heat, 
so that's a safe assumption.

#4 of 4 by rcurl on Fri Apr 1 19:35:39 2011:

My brother's computer's HD has "crashed" (he says). He had not backed it up
so wonders if he can still read files from it. I presume there must be an
adapter to use it as an external drive and then just read the files from it.
Is this practical? I presume it would depend upon the catalog and other files
needed to read from the drive being OK, which might be the case if only the
system files are corrupt. What say?

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