What's the fastest ATA drive?

[Kaido]

Looking for a quick ATA drive for an external Firewire enclosure for use as a boot drive on a Mac. There's lots of info on SATA drives but not much on ATA drives; any suggestions?

 

[iRONic]

7200rpm, 16MB cache are pretty snappy.

 

[Kaido]

Originally posted by: iRONic
7200rpm, 16MB cache are pretty snappy.

Any drives in particular? I'm not looking for a specific capacity, just speed.

 

[iRONic]

Originally posted by: Kaido

Any drives in particular? I'm not looking for a specific capacity, just speed.

Have you checked storagereview.com?

I have a 200GB Maxtor - 16mb, 7200rpm in this rig that I pulled from my external enclosure. It ran/runs fine. Some users say Maxtor is crap. *shrug* I have three machines in my house with them and I haven't had a problem yet. *knocks wood*

 

[Arcanedeath]

The WD 16mb Cache sata drives are pretty good price / performance the Pata ones are not quite as good but still decent.

 

[Bobthelost]

I wouldn't bother worrying about speed all that much, the bottleneck is still going to be the firewire istn' it?

Having said all of that, the bigger the drive the better. Larger drives are faster ones.

WD are pretty much the fastest around, followed by the hitachi deskstar serries (not sure if either come in PATA), seagates aren't bad and the 7200.9 line comes in PATA.

 

[iRONic]

Originally posted by: Bobthelost
I wouldn't bother worrying about speed all that much, the bottleneck is still going to be the firewire istn' it?

Good point. Is firwire faster than USB 2.0?

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: iRONic

Originally posted by: Bobthelost
I wouldn't bother worrying about speed all that much, the bottleneck is still going to be the firewire istn' it?

Good point. Is firwire faster than USB 2.0?

Much faster, the specs don't look like it is, but there is no real contest in practice.

 

[Stas]

USB 2.0 is faster than FW400 but slower than FW800 🙂

 

[bjc112]

Originally posted by: Stas
USB 2.0 is faster than FW400 but slower than FW800 🙂

No, firewire is faster in both instances..

Even though USB 2.0 is listed @ 480Mbps, firewire WINS.

 

[Bobthelost]

Originally posted by: Stas
USB 2.0 is faster than FW400 but slower than FW800 🙂

Wrong. For sustained file transfers any firewire is faster.

 

[Kaido]

In my experience Firewire is the more stable solution, ESPECIALLY for external optical drives. Ugh, USB DVD burners...ugh!