In the world of hard drives, size matters, but do the other specifications match up? Our tests yield some surprising conclusions that can make choosing a hard drive a whole lot easier.
While this story was being researched, in the middle of an interview with an executive at a hard-drive company, a distressed marketing person broke into the conversation. "Look," she said, "I don't want to see a quote saying it doesn't matter which hard drive you buy." She had reason to worry: in responding to our questions about the wide range of hard-drive options available to consumers, the exec was repeatedly drawn to the conclusion that performance differences among current-model hard drives were so slight that most desktop users wouldn't notice. This is not exactly the kind of information that will make it into the company's future marketing efforts.
If performance is a nonissue for desktop users, then you're left with the simple proposition of balancing capacity and price. Our advice: find the cheapest hard drive that has the capacity you need.
Our look behind the numbers of five popular internal hard drives echoed our friendly exec's sentiments. With models supplied by leading vendors Maxtor and Seagate--and two 2GHz Pentium 4 desktop computers from Dell--we were able to isolate a number of hard-drive performance factors. When the smoke cleared, differences that looked big on paper turned out to have little bearing on actual user experience, even in tests that employed large video and audio files and even when benchmark results suggested some drives were significantly faster than others.
In fact, the second-largest performance difference we encountered originated from a simple driver upgrade you can do yourself for free, but we'll get to that in a minute.
Meanwhile, remember that our downplaying of performance as a buying criteria applies to current, internal hard-drive models for desktop applications. Older drives in older systems may perform significantly slower. And external drives, particularly compact ones, may be slower still. Also, when you pick a hard drive for a server, different criteria kick in that make a serious look at certain specs worthwhile.
Yet internal hard drives for desktop applications are commodities, pure and simple. No wonder prices have fallen so low--to the point where you can find a speedy, brand-name 120GB drive for less than AU$400. It's enough to give a marketing person nightmares. For consumers, though, the numbers couldn't be better.
Internal hard drives: a performance plateau
If hard drive speed doesn't matter anymore, which specs do?
Interface face-off: SCSI vs. EIDE
For desktop users, the choice is obvious.
Capacity vs. cost
What size hard drive? We'll show you the sweet spot(s).
Portable performance
How should you balance performance, portability, and price?
Free hard-drive speed upgrade!
A simple driver download could improve your hard drive's performance.
| Intro | Performance plateau | SCSI vs EIDE | Capacity vs cost | Portable performance | Free upgrade |
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