Livin' Large

Interface of the Future

Interface speed limits will jump even more with the transition to Serial ATA, which is expected to debut late this year or early in 2002 and should raise the top transfer limit to 150 MBps. Next, the limit is expected to double to 300 MBps and eventually redouble to 600 MBps. In addition to being faster, Serial ATA looks different from current IDE parallel connections. Instead of using 80-wire, flat-ribbon cables, it has a round cable about the size of your PC's mouse cord, with an eight-pin connector on each end. The smaller cables take up less space and allow cooling air to flow more freely through a PC's interior, theoretically permitting smaller, more innovative system designs.

When Serial ATA arrives, you can say good-bye to drive jumpers--those connectors that fit onto one of several sets of pins and tell the drive whether it should act as the main, or master, drive on a shared ribbon cable, or whether it should serve as the auxiliary, or slave, drive. With Serial ATA's new star topology, individual cables will radiate from a central interface on the motherboard, each connecting to only a single, independent drive.

Is It Time to Upgrade?

Better, faster technology is always around the corner, so if you're considering upgrading now, you'll need to weigh some other factors--starting with how full your current drive is. If you constantly prune unneeded data and still have a drive that's more than 75 percent full, it's probably time for a step up. Even if you don't foresee filling that remaining space with permanent files, you'll need some wiggle room to accommodate the Windows swap file and other temporary files that your applications create.

Just how big a drive you should choose depends on what you do with your PC. If you work mainly with garden-variety applications such as a word processor or a spreadsheet program, you are unlikely to create large files that consume a lot of hard drive space, and you could probably opt for an inexpensive drive such as the 20.5GB version of IBM's Deskstar 40GV. But if you edit and save graphics, audio, or video files, your storage space can disappear quickly. For example, video from a digital camcorder can require up to 3.6MB per second. A 1-hour movie fills about 13GB of storage, and you'll need plenty of extra space for temporary files created during the editing process.

Does Speed Matter?

In addition to the issue of available storage, there's the question of speed. The 5400-rpm hard drives are value leaders, but 7200-rpm drives generally deliver better performance. Here, as with capacity, your speed needs depend on the type of applications you run.

To evaluate a drive's performance, the PC World Test Center timed how long each drive took to perform common tasks (for details, see the test report). To begin, we copied 166MB of data, first as a collection of individual files and folders, and then as a single zipped file. Next we ran automated scripts that performed disk-intensive operations in Adobe Photoshop 5.5, Microsoft Access 97, and Corel Photo-Paint 8. Finally, we ran a find file operation that required searching through files on the entire hard drive for a string of text.

The range of scores varied from test to test. All drives performed quite similarly on Access 97 and Photoshop 5.5, for instance (differing by 2 percent and 7 percent, respectively). But we saw much bigger differences on the two file copy tests (about 170 percent and 250 percent, respectively) and on the find file test, where the speediest drive was almost three times faster than the slowest. So if you routinely move large amounts of data to and from your hard drive (as in video editing), the speed differences will matter. If you're a digital video professional (or a dedicated amateur), one of the largest, fastest drives on this list, such as Maxtor's DiamondMax Plus 60 or IBM's 75.1GB Deskstar 75GXP, is worth the cost.

The fastest drives on the market today use SCSI interfaces: 10,000-rpm SCSI drives are common, and Seagate produces a 15,000-rpm model. Such ultrafast drives are designed for use in busy, multiuser environments--such as heavily trafficked servers--and they cost about twice as much as current IDE drives of similar capacity. For both of those reasons, this review does not cover SCSI drives.