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The Best Hard Disks
Choosing a hard drive is not just above buying one with the highest capacity or RPM. It is more about knowing what you will use it for and the price that you will pay for it
PCQ
Saturday, August 09, 2003
How do you choose the right hard drive? It depends on your needs. Are you a CIO who needs to buy hard drives for his servers? A multimedia developer who makes complex 3D models or does video editing? A business user who is looking for more value for money? Or, a college kid who wants extra gigs for his ever-growing collection of music, videos and games?
In this story, we’ll see how you can choose the right hard disk for your requirement.
 Hard drives today are available in three interfaces: SCSI (Small Computers System Interface, pronounced as skuzzy), Fibre Channel and ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment). The last one, ATA, is broken into serial ATA and parallel ATA.
The server side
Fast I/O is the essence of servers. This has made SCSI and fibre-channel drives the most popular choice here. The factors for choosing a SCSI or fibre-channel drive are its spindle speed, data transfer rates, buffer memory, interface (Ultra 320 or Ultra 160), robustness and cost per GB. SCSI drives are available in two major spindle speeds, 10000 and 15000 RPM.
Rotational speeds, along with the interface, largely determine the data-transfer rate of the drive.
Among the drives we tested, we found that to get a 20% gain in performance (using a 15,000 RPM drive), the buyer has to pay 40% more than a 10,000 RPM drive. This market is more performance-driven than price, but the relative increase in price is almost double the gain a user gets in performance. So, you need to determine whether the application you need it for really needs this gain. For example, if you have a NAS device on your Ethernet network, you may opt for a slower speed SCSI drive. With the increase in capacities, robustness and speed in the recent times on the ATA front, you may even want to put SATA boxes on your network. On the other hand, in a SAN setup, working on fibre channel, the I/O performance requirements are much higher, so you may need that 20% gain. If you have servers running mission-critical applications, such as ERP or RDBMS, you would need that extra performance gain.
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TEST
RESULTS FOR SCSI DRIVES |
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TEST
RESULTS FOR IDE DRIVES |
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The multimedia story
There is no limit to which the desire of a multimedia developer will go. Both in the sense of his creativity and his HDD needs. Multimedia developers include the community that does CAD/CAM, 3D modeling, large-format printing, print design, video editing, etc. The need for fast drives and capacity here is immense. That’s why a combination of ATA and SCSI drives is used here. The SCSI drive is used more as a scratch disk or as temporary storage. This is when the fast data access is important. The quantity part of the disks is sufficed by the ATA drives. But, with the speeds promised by the SATA consortium, the day may not be far when the lower end of this segment may migrate to the cheaper
SATA.
For the office
The markets we talked of are very performance sensitive where storage is concerned, but there is a flipside to it too. There’s also the group that wants hard drives at the lowest possible cost along with a good warranty, with performance taking a backseat in comparison. This is the storage attached to an ordinary office PC. Even though drive capacities have touched the 300 GB mark, and their cost per GB also turns out to be pretty low, do you really need to go for one? The answer is governed more by what you plan to use the drive for and the actual capacity needed for that. For instance, an ordinary office PC running productivity applications, such as an Office Suite, Web browser or accounting package, would probably suffice with a 20 GB hard drive running at 5400 rpm. So, there’s no real need to go for a higher capacity and faster drive, even if it gives a lower cost per GB. What’s important here is the actual cost comparison of the 20 GB drive with higher capacity ones. Typically, a 20 GB drive would cost 2/3rd of a 40 GB drive. Now, if you’re going to buy a 100 nodes for your network, imagine the cost saving you’ll get with the 20 GB drive. This doesn’t mean that cost per GB isn’t important. It becomes important when you really need a high-capacity drive and have different models to choose from. The total cost of the drive, rather than the price per GB, and the warranty are the deciding parameters for this segment.
More gigs
Today a home user can do almost everything on his PC that he used to do with his other entertainment devices. This includes listening to music, watching/capturing movies, playing games and even watching television. All this adds to the HDD needs of the user. These people want good performance from the hard drive, does not want to pay much and yet wants loads of capacity. This segment is also very sensitive about upgradability. They can look towards buying faster PATA or even the new SATA 7200 rpm drives. SATA would be a good choice for a new PC, as that seems to be the future of IDE drives.
In the pages that follow, we’ve reviewed 12 different hard drives, which are a mix of all the different types of drives we talked of here.
Next Page : The Best IDEs Page(s) 1 2 3 4
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