[HD Question] Higher ATA, or lower seek time?

By DELTA75329
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DELTA75329

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OK guys, here?s the deal:

As some of you know, I?m in the middle of building a new :). :)

My questions today concern harddrive interfaces and seek times. I know lower seek times are better, so I was wondering if ATA-133 is really a noticeable boost over ATA-100.

I?m planning on buy two of the exact same drive, but I?m concerned about the interface vs the see:ermm:. :ermm:

My choice has been narrowed down to

Maxtor, which offers ATA-133, but... higher seek time:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....epa=1&section=3

Or the Seagate, which offers better (lower) seek time, but... runs on ATA-100:

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc....epa=1&section=3

My questions are:

1 - Is it better to have lower seek times, or higher ATA ratings? (The source of my concern is this question)

2 - Which is likely to perform better as a system drive, and show the best performance with large file transfers? (As I plan to do video editing and the like, I want to be able to backup 800+ meg files between the drives)

I?m not planning on doing SATA because I?m still getting the same performance, yet paying more money than I feel comfortable spending. (Since each drive gets it?s own IDE channel, and runs off the PCI bus like SATA, the performance would be equal anyway.) The cable thing doesn?t do much for me either, since rounded HD cables take care of that problem. Also, I don?t know much about RAID at this time, so I?m not planning on setting that up right now. That is an option for the future though, as the drives will be connected to a ATA-133 RAID Controller. (However, the RAID card will be configured to run as a standard controller for the time being.)

Thanks very much in advance for the help. If anyone needs more information, :cool: let me know. :cool:

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ThunderRiver

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The optimal drive would be higher ATA rating with lower seeking time. Lower seeking time means it takes less time to read file, so files would load faster. On the other hand, even though the file is loading fast, you do run into a bottleneck as ATA 100 doesn't allow as much bandwidth as ATA 133. I don't know about you, but you should look further into it or wait till a better model comes out.

On the other hand, in my experience, if you have lots of big files, you are better off choosing Seagate than Maxtor. My Maxtor died on me due to burnt motor chip, and I moved big files all the time on that drive.

You do need to look into Hitachi hard drive. They are the first one to sell hard drives with FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearing). Last time I checked with Western Digital, they only sale those FDB drive in Japan. FDB is very good for hard drive, and it has been employeed by 2.5" laptop drive for quite sometime. It will ensure your drive to survive longer without failure. Most conventional hard drive comes with ball bearing, which can cause hard drive to fail eventually.

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Sticktron

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Lower seek times will definately be more noticeable performance-wise. You rarely (if ever) make use of the max burst rating (100 or 133). That speed is only attained during transfers of data from the buffer. Get a drive with a large cache for sure, 8mb, and a low seek time. The burst rate won't make much of a difference.

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DELTA75329

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The optimal drive would be higher ATA rating with lower seeking time. Lower seeking time means it takes less time to read file, so files would load faster. On the other hand, even though the file is loading fast, you do run into a bottleneck as ATA 100 doesn't allow as much bandwidth as ATA 133. I don't know about you, but you should look further into it or wait till a better model comes out.

On the other hand, in my experience, if you have lots of big files, you are better off choosing Seagate than Maxtor. My Maxtor died on me due to burnt motor chip, and I moved big files all the time on that drive.

You do need to look into Hitachi hard drive. They are the first one to sell hard drives with FDB (Fluid Dynamic Bearing). Last time I checked with Western Digital, they only sale those FDB drive in Japan. FDB is very good for hard drive, and it has been employeed by 2.5" laptop drive for quite sometime. It will ensure your drive to survive longer without failure. Most conventional hard drive comes with ball bearing, which can cause hard drive to fail eventually.

Maxtor offer the FDB motors as well as Seagate..

Hitachi is off my list, since they were a big part of the IBM deathstar nightmare. :s

I hear the Seagate runs cooler and is more reliable than the Maxtor... shame that seagate doesn't do ATA-133.

Right now, I'm leaning towards the Seagate. I'm gonna see if I can find an article that compares ATA-100 to ATA-133.

Thanks for the help so far guys, keep it comin'. :)

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Stokkolm

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I?m not planning on doing SATA because I?m still getting the same performance, yet paying more money than I feel comfortable spending.

Actually it is faster, if SATA was regular IDE it would be ATA150 and you'll notice the difference there. From 100 to 133 you won't see anything so I'd go with the Seagate but you should look more into SATA.

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DELTA75329

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Lower seek times will definately be more noticeable performance-wise.  You rarely (if ever) make use of the max burst rating (100 or 133).  That speed is only attained during transfers of data from the buffer.  Get a drive with a large cache for sure, 8mb, and a low seek time.  The burst rate won't make much of a difference.

The burst rate is FROM THE BUFFER!?

I read that somewhere, and that's why the having a larger buffer is better. And I think you're right about the burst rate to the system rarely, IF EVER, being really taken advatage of.

THANK YOU for the info here, you've given me a couple of ideas to look into. Thanks! :D

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Sticktron

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I just noticed you put up the two different seek times-- they are almost the same! I wouldn't worry about that difference. And honestly, if you are concerned about the difference 0.8ms might make, you would be foolish to overlook RAID. A RAID-0 setup (just get 2 identical drives) will almost *double* your performance. Without RAID, you might see 30-40mb/s out of those drives; with RAID you will see 60-80mb/s, and I'm not talking about burst speed here, but rather real world transfer rates.

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DELTA75329

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Actually it is faster, if SATA was regular IDE it would be ATA150 and you'll notice the difference there. From 100 to 133 you won't see anything so I'd go with the Seagate but you should look more into SATA.

Right, but as of now, all SATA controllers run off the PCI bus @ 33MHz, limiting SATA to ATA-133 effectively. SATA has performance advatages that I cannot use right now.

PCI Express will address this problem, but I don't plan to wait for that.

Grand Master

Stokkolm

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Maxtor offer the FDB motors as well as Seagate..

Hitachi is off my list, since they were a big part of the IBM deathstar nightmare. :s

I hear the Seagate runs cooler and is more reliable than the Maxtor... shame that seagate doesn't do ATA-133.

Right now, I'm leaning towards the Seagate. I'm gonna see if I can find an article that compares ATA-100 to ATA-133.

Thanks for the help so far guys, keep it comin'. :)

Try this one.

http://www.amdmb.com/article-display.php?ArticleID=151

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I think it's becoming apparent, that the market doesn't wanna steer us to ATA-133, maybe because they went us to spend money on SATA (ATA-150). What leads me to this conclusion is that Maxtor AFAIK is the single ATA-133 producer at this time, and its' competitors, namely Seagate and Western Digital have not invested in ATA-133, but have invested in SATA.

Furthermore, from what benchmarks I have seen, ATA-133 is not a proven performance leader vs. the current ATA-100 7200 RPM drives, perhaps bad implementation from Maxtor?

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DELTA75329

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I just noticed you put up the two different seek times-- they are almost the same! I wouldn't worry about that difference. And honestly, if you are concerned about the difference 0.8ms might make, you would be foolish to overlook RAID. A RAID-0 setup (just get 2 identical drives) will almost *double* your performance. Without RAID, you might see 30-40mb/s out of those drives; with RAID you will see 60-80mb/s, and I'm not talking about burst speed here, but rather real world transfer rates.

I know RAID is better, but I've never played with it before. I'm not ready to take the plunge with Dynamic partitions yet.. I still want to do more research first.

I do plan to employ RAID in the future, but for now, I need to get the best drives for it.

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DELTA75329

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I think it's becoming apparent, that the market doesn't wanna steer us to ATA-133, maybe because they went us to spend money on SATA (ATA-150). What leads me to this conclusion is that Maxtor AFAIK is the single ATA-133 producer at this time, and its' competitors, namely Seagate and Western Digital have not invested in ATA-133, but have invested in SATA.

Furthermore, from what benchmarks I have seen, ATA-133 is not a proven performance leader vs. the current ATA-100 7200 RPM drives, perhaps bad implementation from Maxtor?

I think you're right... Looks like Maxtor is the only one.

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