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The Hard Word

by Staff Writers  on Oct 1, 2002
Tags: The | Hard | Word
Many people upgrade their PCs by adding the latest CPU or more memory, but leave their old hard disk in place. The humble hard disk is one of the slowest components inside a PC (in fact, only optical
Many people upgrade their PCs by adding the latest CPU or more memory, but leave their old hard disk in place. The humble hard disk is one of the slowest components inside a PC (in fact, only optical drives are slower), so it is imperative that your PC is equipped with a fast disk to minimise this potential data bottleneck.

We found the difference in speed between the fastest and slowest disks on test to be around a whopping 47%, so imagine what the difference would be if you replaced your old hard disk with the fastest disk tested here. For the internal hard drives we specified IDE connected ATA- 100/133 drives at 40GB, 60GB, 80GB and 100GB+ capacities.

You might be asking yourself where the SCSI drives are in the roundup, but we have left those for another day. As it is, data storage technology has advanced considerably over the last two years, such that the fastest EIDE disks can outperform their SCSI counterparts in a desktop or workstation environment. Western Digitals SE 120GB Caviar drive, for example, has a peak transfer rate of 40MB/s, putting many SCSI disks to shame.

Weve also gazed into the murky world of Serial ATA, the next generation hard drive technology that should be out by the end of the year. Our main focus is on internal hard drives, but weve also broadened our scope to include external hard drives and networked attached storage (NAS), as theyre based around hard disk technology.

Although performance is sacrificed by using a USB 2 or IEEE-1394 interface, external disks hold several
advantages over their internal cousins. First, theyre portable, so you can transfer large files to other PCs or
notebooks without resorting to multiple CD-Rs or investing in an expensive DVD burner. Second, theyre simple to install. And last, theyre the only solution if you have no free internal bays left.

NAS is perfect when you have a whole lot of data that needs sharing among a big group of people, because
NAS devices are basically boxes full of hard disks (usually in RAID configuration) with a 10/100 or
Gigabit Ethernet port on the back. You find a spare port on your network, plug them in, and start storing.

Weve rounded up the latest disks from all the major manufacturers starting at 40GB, and put them through their paces with our exhaustive suite of tests. With prices per gigabyte starting from just $2.69 for the largest disks, theres little reason to buy a small disk anymore.

TECHNICAL EDITOR Darren Ellis
CONTRIBUTORS Daniel Gardiner,
Jim Martin and Alyn Sparkes
This article appeared in the October, 2002 issue of PC Authority.


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