Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sean W. Smith who wrote (5235)	1/18/1999 11:50:00 AM
From: Spots	Respond to of 14778

You are correct in the limitations of such comparisons, but I didn't mean them to be precise, just indicative. Exactly the same considerations make rpm comparisons imprecise as well. Yes, there are other assumptions of equality for these comparisons to be accurate. Using numers like 33 and 31 percent was misleading as they imply precision I didn't mean to claim. To make these comparisons exact there would have to be the same number of platters and the same number of tracks per platter. Even then the comparison would be valid only for a burst within the same physical cylinder. Cache performance is another issue also. Other things make higher rpm drives faster for some operations regardless of density. Rotational latency is smaller for random access, for instance. Nevertheless, some higher density drives do perform significantly better than lower ones of the same general characteristics (rpm in particular), exactly because of the higher density of data passing under the head, which has precisely the same effect as raising the rpm by the density ratio for a sequential data stream. Benchmarks support this, particularly for the high-capacity Maxtors. The benchmark comparison I read was, I believe, the 13gig maxtor 5400 vs the 8G IBM at 7200, though I wouldn't swear to those details.