More rant
<<From this thread, we see that people still insist on recommending drives that are 40% slower than what is available. It's just nuts. All hard drives are not the same, or even close in performance--from from it. Can you imagine if people here all recommended a VIA C3/C4 processor, claiming it was the best processor available, while completely ignoring everything from AMD and Intel? That's what most people here are doing--except for hard drives.
Hard drives are the slowest components in most modern systems. They are the bottleneck. As a result, hard drive performance impacts system responsiveness a good deal more than other components. Whereas we sometimes debate merits of CAS2 vs CAS3 latency, difference that is only measured in nanoseconds, hard drive performance is measured in milliseconds (thousands of nanoseconds). As far as performance goes, there is far more difference in system performance as seen with different hard drives....than there is with CAS2 vs CAS3 memory, or 133FSB vs 150FSB (at same cpu freq). Hard drives play a huge role in how fast web pages are saved to the cache, how fast web pages are read from the cache, how fast drives and folders pop up in windows, how fast directories list, how fast image thumbnails show in explorer, how fast applications launch, how fast you can save and open documents, how long it takes game levels to load, how long it takes to join a net game, and so on.>>
Would you kindly point out what drives of the current generation are overall 40-some% slower than the competition? Are you telling me every test StorageReview does is 100% indicative of our daily usages? The problem is not how people recommend hard drives, the problem is that people like you worship into these StorageReview numbers way too much, in a blind test you probably will never notice enough difference to tell which drive is which. You're only misleading the people if you're trying to say these tests tell the full story, and you'd be pretty crazy to think Maxtors and Seagates are VIA C4s compare to WD as P4s. What looks to be a 40% difference on SR Mark maybe no difference at all in a real world situation. Am I saying StorageReview is inaccurate? No. But their tests are based only on a certain constant pattern, even if their tests are not constant, it still wouldn't be adequate in representing every possible scenario in real life usages. Like MadOnion's 3DMark, it only measures how good the video card can be, not how good the video card is. Who here play games with stopwatches in their hands every time they load up a level anyway? Nobody. A lot of times, speed isn't even the most important thing; for example, Joe Brown wants the largest hard drive, but Jim Black wants the quietest, while Jack Blue needs the cheapest. The fact is, no hard drive manufacturer holds the fastest, largest, quietest and cheapest hard drive available. Every manufacturer has some assets, if there is indeed a manufacturer that holds all the good qualities, then they would own 100% market share, but you know that's impossible. This is exactly why we shouldn't limit ourselves to only one brand, or limit ourselves to only the speed factor.
<<I'll let you others in on a little secret: just because you like what's in your system...does not mean that its the best thing available now. Just because a certain vendor may have offered the fastest drive(s) in the past does not mean that they do so now. And just because a vendor's drive reliability was good, bad. pr mediocre in the past....does not mean that it's good, bad, or mediocre now. The hard drive industry is constantly changing....one vendor may offer the fastest drive for 3-4 months, then another vendor may have the highest performing drive, then another, and so on. Each vendor, at times, has leapfrogged the other by introducing some new technology. All you can do is buy the best available at the time; you do not do yourself any favors by buying the fastest drive from two years ago, a year ago, or even six months ago.>>
If they think it's the best thing available to them, why not? Like I said, speed isn't the only thing on everyone's minds. A lot of people rather sacrifice performance for less noise; some people are on a small budget so the best thing to them are the low-priced hard drives; some people needs storage space so the biggest hard drives are the best thing to them; some are very cautious about support, so the warranty/replacement services are the best thing to them. You have no right to define what's "best" for other people, only they can define what's "best" for themselves.
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