Go into more detail, please. I heard there is bus speed involved in HDD's which is something weird to me. I also heard about NCQ, is that something like indexing? What's the difference between 1.5 and 3.0? So I this is the level of importance I would give to each (or some) component(s) in a HDD's speed factor. -RPM -Interface (SATA or PATA) -Cache memory Am I right? P.S. This is sooo weird!! How come a HDD is a SATA HDD if it's barely any faster??!
Serial ATA is merely the interface a hard disk runs on. If you like, it's like putting a Car that can only do 30mph on an empty major highway as opposed to an empty local road, it will still achieve the same speed because there wasn't anything slowing it down before. The same drive on a new bus won't make it any faster, much like putting an AGP card on the PCI express platform. However, Serial ATA hosts the newer, better drives, since it's a newer interface, and therefore indirectly S-ATA drives are faster, but not by much since it's not the interface that makes them faster, only the fact that they're new revisions. You are right in thinking more cache gives more performance, and the latest Caviar SE16s by Western Digital are very fast and quiet, partly because they're 16MB cache drives, but also because they're new. RPM is indeed the most important factor, because that DOES dramatically affect the drive's performance, hence why my 10,000rpm Raptor will walk all over a 4200rpm laptop drive. Would you like me to explain RAID?
