I noticed at a computer store today that it's possible to buy a freaking 1TB drive for just AU$350 (US$315), which blew my mind. A mate bought up a good question though that as the size of the drive increases, and considering the drive is still at 7200rpm SATAII with 16meg cache (pretty much what my 120GB drive has), wouldn't the read speeds be slow as hell? I thought about it, shrugged, and decided to ask here [smile]

The drive size hasn't changed, but the data density has gone up.
Thus, if anything you can expect faster data rates, and comparable seek times.
But don't take my word for it, look up benchmarks for the drive:
750Gb drives give very good performance numbers, i'd expect the 1Tb ones to have similar increases in performance.

You would think so. From what I understand, higher capacity hard drives use some sort of layering technique to pack more data onto it, or something like that. Extreme Tech had an interesting article on how hard drives work.

If they were slower, you could always just get 4 250GB drives instead, and configure them as a striped raid - then it'd be ~4 times as fast ;)

Quote: Original post by KulSeran
The drive size hasn't changed, but the data density has gone up.
Thus, if anything you can expect faster data rates, and comparable seek times.

So how do hard drives differ from media such as Blu-Ray? The size of the Blu-ray disc is (as far as I'm aware) the same size as a normal DVD, but I thought that one of the disadvantages of 50GB DVD’s was the fact that because there is so much data on it, the read times can be much slower than of a normal DVD? Could it be attributed to the read speed of the Blu-ray drive itself, which might be slower than a normal DVD reader because of the higher density DVD's it needs to read?

A quick google and:
a 54x CD drive will get you a peak of around 7Mb/sec
a 6x DVD drive is approximately equivalent
a 2x BlueRay drive is approximately equivalent.
So in a general sense, the numbers they give you are kinda screwy if you dont know what 1x refers to.

The wording I think you are confusing is what is taking a long time. It isn't that a 1Tb drive doesn't read fast, or
that a blueray doesn't read fast, but that the capacity is far in excess of what the read speeds can manage in a reasonable period of time.
The drives are roughly equivelent in speed, but the capacity means that it takes longer to copy a full disk worth of information.

You aren't going to get a 50% increase in speed for a 50% increase in data density (talking the 500 -> 750Gb drives)
and that same logic follows for the optical drives. The data is packed in 2d, not 1d, so increased data density doesn't mean
that all the packing was done along the data path, and as such will speed seek times, but not data rates.

^^

Ah, of course! I guess I was getting a bit confused >_<

Cheers [smile]