Hello! I was planning to buy a new computer soon and I'd like to know if soonly will be a new format for hdd, one between sata and scsi perhaps? more rpm means faster write/read transfer, isn't it?

Get IDE RAID then.

Don't confuse the drive's speed with the speed of the interface. Many current SATA-150 drives don't even break ATA-66 speeds.

I guess the fastest drives are probably still the WD Raptors - particularly the 74GB Raptor 2 - even more power than the older model with half the capacity - these are 10,000RPM drives!

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=2073

At the moment, the sustained throughput is nowhere near the SATA limit.

One thing that IS coming - SATA-II with NCQ (Native command queueing)
http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp
Looks like double the speed is also part of the SATA-II feature set, though not the defining feature.

SATA II with NCQ has already come. Standard on Samsung's P120 series HDDs. Maxtor and some others were faster than Samsung and Samsung was probably the latest to release SATA II HDDs? The SATA II interface supports up to 300MB/s, but no experienced users should expect a conventional IDE/ATA/SCSI HDD could run at 300MB/s at any moment. For average daily situations, I believe even 50MB/s sustained average speed is very fast.

BTW, all HDD manufacturers are looking at perpendicular recording type HDDs of the future to reach beyond 500GB and even 1TB. Not sure whether Toshiba was the first to release drives for the mass market using perpendicular method, but it surely looks promising.

I was fooled into paying more for my SATA drive thinking it would be noticeably faster than the IDE ones... but thats not so. It is faster... but by a hairs width

Apparently.. and don't quote me.. the IDE drives on the market now are actually using the same electronics as the SATA ones, but have the addition of a SATA-to-IDE convertor.

(Is that right ??)

For many models, you are correct. Test results I have done on a number of SATA/IDE drives also seem to confirm this.

just use a RAID-0 array with either SATA or PATA drives...just make sure you've got a good backup strategy (which applies to any/all HDD setups anyway)...

Just in reading through PC magazine reviews the Maxtor DiamondMax 10 has had some pretty good reviews, the reviews I read, reviewers were quite impressed with the performance due to the 16mb cache, I would think Seagate and WD have the same versions. Not as fast as the Raptor or Cheatah but the reviews said they weren't that far behind and were surprised at the performance. So if $$$ is a factor this is another option for you to check out.

Maxtor's are the only brand with 16mb of cache AFAIK...and to add to crossg's post above, the DiamondMax10/MaxlineIII (same specs, diff warranty and supposedly different target markets) is highly regarded.

best site to reference when researching HDs (both lab tests and user experiences in the forums) is www.storagereview.com. the DM10/MLIII currently holds the top position on the "Leaderboard" there...

i just got a Maxtor OneTouchII 300GB external w/16mb of cache for full backups of both my PCs and it's performed quite well...i believe it's the same drive as the DM10/MLIII in a dual FW/USB2 ext enclosure...

Raptor and Cheetah drives aren't intended for home markets though you can still use them at home for any purpose. The latest 15K.4 and 10K.7 from Seagate and similarly-featured 10K- to 15K-RPM drives from other manufacturers work best under multi-user server environments.

Fujitsu and Samsung HDDs are slower but more silent than competitors. IBM (now Hitachi) drives are expensive but have the fastest access times among IDE/ATA drives.

For HDD reviews, I go to Storagereview.com.

Maxtors have a very high failure rate the past 2 years - seacrh google, you will find loads of reported problems. People I work with, and at work, have all experienced a high failure rate with Maxtor drives. One day they are working, the next you cannot read from them. Maxtor's utility cannot fix them, but the low-level option often brings them back to life - but do you trust them after having several fail in the same way. Something to do with the fluid bearings and other advances causing grief.

We also have moved from Seagate to Maxtor at work on a 16 Terrabyte Fibre Channel storage system, due to the manufacturer selecting cheaper drives - too early to tell with these devices, but some have died - but that is normal during the burn in period (several months).

Hm. For FC storage, Seagate is far more experienced, but for desktop environment, failure rates among Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, Samsung, Fujitsu, IBM-Hitachi, and others shouldn't be that different. None of them can survive if failure rate of their drives is too high.

Fluid bearing is used in all the big manufacturers.

I'm personally not intersted in buying anything other than Samsung because P120 series HDDs are both the cheapest and best-supported in South Korea.

WD only uses FDB in their Raptors and 320GB Caviar....

i've read about Maxtor's reliability issues...i've had WDs die on me too though...so i've got a mixed bag of HDDs...just like your investment portfolio - diversify, diversify, diversify!!

i stand corrected: http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=133

SATA II
16mb cache
$199

I have heard of several people using raptors with raid 0. It is suposed to be blazing fast!!! Even with my maxtor 7200rpm drives it gave a nice little speed increase though.

Well it depends on what they are used for, but there sure is a nice speed increase . I have a raided set of Raptors (RAID-0) and they outperform any other disc I have, with ease...

Raid-0 speed gains are mostly theoretical and demonstrated only in benchmark tests. You will not see the gains except in very large file transfers to and from equally fast drives/arrays. The chief benefit from Raptor drives is in the access times, and is very noticable. RAID-0 can be (and often is) actually slower with small files, which makes it unsuitable for desktop applications.

Also slower for the average gaming machine. Thanks for pointing this out rdgrimes. Now the RAID advocates will shoot at you, not at me.

I'm no expert here, so corect me if I am wrong, but can't you overcome that by using a small block size (assuming that your raid hardware supports a decent range of block sizes). Of course a smaller block size would hurt your performance with larger files and transfers so It's a one or the other kind of thing. I could have sworn that some of the gamers had gotten beter performance with cards that support relatively small block sizes last time I researched raid, but I could be remembering wrong. It's been a while since I researched raid (I kind of got pissed off about it after discovering that my pos siig raid card conflicted with my hitachi drives for raid 1 and wasn't bootable with maxtors for raid 0). Right now my raid 0 is just for data (not the boot drive) and the raid 1 is running off the onboard raid.

On a side note since I have the atention of some raid experts (sorry, don't mean to hijack the thread), do any of you know if the newer motherboards that support ide and sata raid can run both at the same time (ie raid 1 and raid 0 running seperatlly using 4 drives)?