Hard luck

Just as Moore's Law keeps CPU frequency kicking up a notch every so often, so too goes the humble hard disk drive's capacity to cater to the growing needs of both professional and home users.

While hard disk drive speed is commonly one of the last considerations when putting together a new machine, its importance is more than just a place to store your files and operating system. Hard disk drive performance is comparable to CPU speed and graphical prowess for everyone from desktop users to gamers. Motherboard manufacturers understand the changing nature of the storage market and the latest motherboards now offer generous amounts of connectivity for both parallel ATA and serial ATA drives.

PCs have made an incredible evolution, moving away from square beige boxes to sensual shapes and colours. The flow over of this is the move of the PC out of the bedroom into the lounge room and into a more media focused role rather than that of just an oversized calculator and word processor. DV transfer, editing and audio manipulation as well as digital photography and touch-up work are commonplace in even the most inexperienced user's homes, all of which require large amounts of space to perform.

While actual drive space is now into the hundreds of gigabytes as is the case with our Hitachi 400GB behemoth, the real advancements are occurring in the interfaces with the system, serial ATA (SATA) allows you to hot-swap drives at will during operation without powercycling your machine. These types of drives are the equivalent of ECC memory modules, doing error correction on the fly and reducing disk access latency.

Our focus during evaluation of these drives is first and foremost performance, how quickly they do what they do, without neglecting to take into consideration the old chestnut of how deep your pockets are going to have to stretch for you to be able to get your hands on one.