What Is the Fastest Hard Drive?
When considering the power of a computer, many people immediately think of the processor's clock speed or perhaps even the the front side bus speed as it limits the component's ability to communicate. Unfortunately, in most cases these are moot points as the system drives installed that actually supply data across the front side bus through to the processor are painfully slow and bring an otherwise powerful computer to a slow and painful crawl in performance.
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Types
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The three mainstream drives most computer users will use are the old Ultra DMA drives, SATA/SATA II drives, and---to a much smaller extent---the recently released solid state drives.
Misconceptions
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Many users are tricked into believing they are in possession of a fast hard drive simply because the drive uses a fast protocol for for data transfer. Hard drive speed is a subjective term based on whether you want fast random accesses to the disk or large sustained transfers at high bandwidths. Always consider how a potential drive's specifications apply to your specific system before deciding it is fast or efficient.
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Features
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With on board raid becoming more common on motherboard chip sets, it is possible to easily stripe several hard drives together to ensure high sustained transfers and extremely fast random seek and access times. This eliminates the need for a single expensive hard drive as many smaller, cheaper drives can be striped together to create impressive performance.
Warning
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Regardless of any specification or performance rating proper drive maintenance is crucial to maintaining a properly operating disk system. If your disk's operating environment is overly hot the drives will throttle their performance down to reduce heat. Also, excessive heat above 55 degrees Celsius will cause a marked decrease in a drive's operating time before failure.
Potential
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With solid state disks coming into main stream computing, the physical limitations of mechanical parts within hard drives is quickly becoming less of a concern. Because solid state drives have no moving parts, they generate less heat and access data many times faster than our current mainstream mechanical drives. Utilizing SAS communications protocol and flash memory technology, solid state drives are currently the fastest hard drives available.
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