hard drive, what to get
 

ive had about 1 gb free on my 40 gb hard drive for a long time now... and thought it might be time to upgrade. I was looking at some 80 gb ones for around 100$ but i was wondering about some of the terminology im not sure about.
like this one has 7200 rpm and 8 mb of cache memory. can someone explain the inner workings of a hard drive please...

sure..., when shopping for Hard Drives all you really need to look for is size and RPM. 80 Gigs is fine, and 7200 RPM is good. Usually you'll spend less if you buy a 5400 RPM one, but those are slower. I dunno how to explain RPM, but i guess it's the revolutions per minute, meaning the higher the number, the faster data is found on the HD. $100 for 80 GB and 7200 is good.

actually, i would say go for the 5400 rpm drive if u're gonna use it as storage only.

use the faster HD to boot up and then access the data from the secondary one.

After buying my Barracuda SATA 7200 I'll never go back to EIDE again.

Make sure you get a Fluid Dynamic Bearing (FDB) drive. They are quieter than your traditional drives. A 5400rpm drive should be enough for storage purposes but a 7200rpm doesn't cost too much more so I would go with that.

Also seriously look at the WD SE drives. They come with a 8mb cache (like the ones your looking at) standard drives only come with 2mb. Also they have a 3year warrenty, most only come with a 1 year.

higher RPM drives do two things for performance, they speed up the actual data reading from the HD and cut down 'rotational latency' the latter means the time taken for the head to get data thats a revolution or less away.

Its like having a sentence written on a big disk, the start of the sentence is 180o away from the viewer, the rotational latency, is the time it takes for the disk to get to the start of that sentence, the data read time is how fast you read the words.

The downside is typically high RPM drives run hotter and are noiser, as with any mechanical system they can fail more often at higher performance levels

33% faster is the absolute fastest youll get out of it, but thats given that, you defrag the data, and that the disk reading is the bottleneck in your data transfer.

power consumption is higher as well for the laptop people wanting 7200 or 5400.

$100 for an 80 giger is too much $$$$.

Western Digital 80 giger 7200RPM w/8MB Buffer: $86.50

If you don't really need 8MB buffer get this for only $74.50.

BTW, GoogleGear has great prices. Always check them out. Plus, they have free 2nd day delivery on almost everything.

http://www.memorymedia.com/cgi-bin/w...YES&CODE=PHOLD

same product as sixrate, only for 83.89. (free shipping)

sry, just had to beat his price.

all hail pricewatch

I agree with the above posters that recommend the Western Digital Special Edition drives. I've bought several of those for myself and for others and can highly recommend them.

The 8MB cache will really give you noticable speed boosts.

Nice try, but 2nd day air is free at GoogleGear. That Place charges an extra $7 for 2nd day air which would bring the price up to $90.89. Sure, ground delivery is free, but he could have the hard drive in two days instead of seven for only an extra $3. Plus I've used Googlegear plenty of times and they have great service. :p