WidowPC Gaming Computers - SATA and ATA Hard Drive Guide
Hard drives in their current form have been around for decades. So, you'd think they would be fairly simple, all the same and not have much room for improvement. If you thought that, you really need to read this guide.
Hard drives making major advancements in technology all the time. Just recently both Hitachi and Western digital announced 100GB 5400 RPM SATA hard drives in the 3.5" form factor for desktop replacement laptops. That's a big step forward. But why? What is SATA? What does the number before the RPM mean?
Let's get started answering those questions with quick tutorial of how a hard drive works followed by an overview of current hard drive technology.
HOW A HARD DRIVE WORKS
Remember the record players we used to listen to as kids? If you are too young for that, you know how a DVD spins inside a DVD player? Well, that's happening in your hard drive too. There is a "disk"; a thin round peice of magnetic material that is spinning really fast. There is also an arm with a little reader on it that moves across the disk just like record player arm called a "spindle."
The faster the disk spins the faster the arm is able to seek out data on the disk. So, the higher the Revolutions Per Minute, or "RPM", the faster the seek speed of the hard drive.
The more space available on that disk to store data the better and more expensive the drive generally is. Data is measured in "bytes" and one billion bytes is a "Gigabyte" or "GB" for short. So, with that learned, we know that 100GB is just a short way of saying "100 billion byte hard drive." That's a lot of space for a private individual and is usually plenty for those who don't have 30 megabyte (MB) games to store on their drives. Since gamers are usually playing more than one game at a time, 160GB is the minimum size we recommend for a serious gamer.
CURRENT HARD DRIVE TECHNOLOGY
The big thing in hard drives these days is the interfaces: IDE and SATA. Most IDE drives usually run at 100MB/s and are referred to as ATA-100 drives. Whereas, Serial ATA (SATA) drives can achieve a burst rate of 150MB/s aka "SATA-150". With both interfaces, there are drives available with drive cache which is basically hard drive performance dedicated memory for the hard drive. Currently, 8MB is the most common, and more recently, 16MB cache drives are beginning to show up.
The coolest hard drive to hit gaming computers for a long time is the Western Digial "Raptor". The Raptor's outstanding feature is that instead of the standard 7200RPM speed found on most drives, the raptors run on a 10,000RPM spindle speed with a SATA interface to the motherboard. Raptors offer a significant performance boost over standard 7200rpm drives due to the incredible responsiveness combined with the fat SATA bandwidth. These drives create enough of a difference in performance, by themselves, that it is noticeable to the human eye even with nongamers.
A technology that we, at WidowPC, are excited about called Native Command Queuing or "NCQ" is not yet widely available. NCQ uses a different queuing algorithm which prioritizing demand for data from the harddrive by making the queries line up in an intelligent, prioritized manner (thus the "queuing" term). Even in 7200RPM speeds (that fastest NCQ drives, currently) they have very nearly the same performance as a Raptor. We can't wait to see a NCQ Raptor...our dream drive.
WHICH ONE SHOULD I GET
Choosing a drive is a decision that is a matter of how you use your computer. If you play a lot of games that load maps or have big save game files or work with large files (video, graphics, etc.), then SATA is your best performance boost. However, if you are doing a lot of database work in which the work calls for frequent small file seeking then go for a the fastest RPM or "spindle speed" you can find. If you can't figure this out, get the WD Raptor, the best of both worlds.
OUR DREAM GAMING RIG HARD DRIVE CONFIGURATION
In gaming you want the OS to have fast access and the game to have fast access to the data they need. This drives game performance. So, get a Raptor to be the exclusive host to the operating system and your favorite game. Any games you are not currently playing and any other files you need to store (word docs, office install, pictures, mp3s, etc.) go on another larger drive. WidowPC offers a Hitachi 400GB 7200 drive that is the largest drive on the planet. This provides you with plenty of storage space and the Raptor gives you the responsiveness and speed you need for gaming.
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