4-way Hard Drive Roundup

t-break’s Abbas Jaffarali compares four hard disk drives on a Shuttle AN50R nForce3-150 motherboard - the Seagate Barracuda 7200.7, Maxtor Atlas 15k, Western Digital Raptor 740GD and Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9:

While rotation speeds have graduated from 4200RPM to 15000RPM, the hard drive continues to be the component that makes you curse your PC while endlessly waiting for Windows to finish swapping files. Increasing your systems memory certainly helps in gaining performance, but you still need to load an application from the hard drive to the memory. Today, we take a look at four hard drives- from the now standard 7200RPM to the latest 10000RPM and even the high-end 15000PRM SCSI. We’ve tested each of these drives in Single and RAID 0 configurations.

..If you want the fastest in IDE then go for the Raptor- you wont regret it and if you can afford, get two drives & RAID them- the access time is amazing on these drives. Unfortunately Raptors tend to not like the “overclocked” PCI bus. If that’s your thing then the Cuda- 7200.7 takes the most beating out of all the drives we tested and they wont cost you an arm and a leg. They are also very reliable but slower compared to other SATA drives.

t-break Recommends Western Digital Raptor 740GD

4-way Hard Drive roundup @ t-break