Hottest Hard Drives
Masha Zager, www.NewsFactor.com
The hard disk drive is one of the great IT success stories. In 20 years, it has progressed from an IBM (NYSE: IBM - news) PC luxury add-on to an indispensable part of any computer, and finally to a component so inexpensive it can be upgraded on impulse. Capacity, performance and reliability all have improved dramatically as costs have fallen. And although one might think manufacturers have nowhere left to go, they continue to push the boundaries of hard drives' capabilities.
Most disk drives on the market today use either Advanced Technology Attachment (ATA) or Small Computer System Interface (SCSI) connections. ATA, which is slower but less expensive, is used mainly in desktop and mobile PCs, while SCSI, faster but more expensive, is used primarily in servers and high-end workstations. Another advantage of SCSI drives for servers is that, unlike ATA drives, they are hot-pluggable, which means they can be replaced while the computer is running.
State of the Art
The standard-size ATA drive included with a PC is now 40 gigabytes (GB), and disks as large as 200 GB are common. In terms of speed, 7200 RPM (rotations per minute) has become the industrywide norm. For the first time, in the third quarter of this year, more than 50 percent of ATA drives sold were 7200 RPM models, according to Darrin Bulik, technical marketing manager at drive manufacturer Western Digital (NYSE: WDC - news).
Of course, performance depends on more than rotational speed, and there are differences among drives. Storage Review, an independent benchmarking group, lists the 200 GB Western Digital Caviar and the 180 GB IBM Ultrastar as the fastest ATA drives on the market, measured by I/O (input/output) per second.
According to Mark Geenen, president of the International Disk Drive Equipment and Materials Association (IDEMA), RPM could be increased even more if PC buses could handle higher data speeds. "The way the PC is constructed slows them down," he told NewsFactor.
High Speed, Reliability
SCSI drives are also in the 40 to 200 GB size range, but their standard speed is 10,000 RPM, significantly higher than the ATA standard, and 15,000-RPM drives have become more widely available. According to Storage Review, the 73 GB Seagate Cheetah and 147 GB Maxtor (NYSE: MXO - news) Atlas are the fastest SCSI models in terms of I/O per second. Based on these statistics, the fastest SCSI drive is about 37 percent faster than the fastest ATA drive.
According to both Bulik and Geenen, disk drive reliability has improved markedly over the years and is now uniformly high. Bulik explained that because the large OEMs to whom disk manufacturers sell their products use the same qualification tests, virtually all of the drives on the market are comparable in terms of reliability.
Bulik added that disk drive capacities also will continue to grow steadily beyond today's 200 GB limit -- and putting a terabyte of data on a PC hard drive is becoming a possibility.
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