Hard disk confusion: please help... need opinion

[Dhanu]

What is more important for performance:

HD ATA/100 at 5700rpm
OR
HD ATA/66 at 7200 rpm

OR

do I need an ATA/100 at 7200 rpm??

Where can I get a deal on the best solution

Thanks,
Dhanu

 

[dowxp]

most new hd's are ata100.

newegg.com has 60gxp 40gb 7.2k ata100 for ~$115? shipped.

 

[andalas]

Best performance is the spindle speed, so the 7200 RPM have better performance than 5400RPM.

You won't notice the different between ATA/100 and ATA/66 since current available drive won't even hit the transfer limit of ATA/66.

 

[gopunk]

no idea which is better, but you can't go wrong with ATA/100 and 7200 rpm. newegg has decently priced deskstar 60gxps, they're pretty good hds.

 

[Desmoquattro]

Aren't ATA100 drives today hitting bursts of at least 66MB?...hmmm...so i guess the 7200rpm would have a faster access time. But what's the price difference anyway? I'm sure it's not that big.

 

[andalas]

I think current generation drive still have sequential transfer rate less than 45mb/s, so running it at ATA/66 would not decrease your performance.