I want to buy a large hard disk but I am slightly confused about some of the specifications. Obviously, I'd like the biggest disk I can afford, but the vendors sometimes try to persuade me to go for a 'faster' disk.
For example, I can get a new notebook computer with a 100GB internal disk running at 7,200rpm or I could get a 120GB disk running at 5,400rpm. Friends tell me that newer 5,400rpm disks can be just as fast as 7,200 ones. I don't understand that. Can you help?
Name supplied Discovery Bay
This is an intriguing question. More than 20 years ago, most of us had floppy disks and ran a single application off one and often had to swap disks to load a larger program. The second drive usually contained a data floppy.
A friend spent a lot of money on an IBM PC at that time but it came with a whopping 20MB hard disk. The tremendous speed of the machine, we later found out, was not due to the processor, but was a direct result of everything running off the hard disk. This was for us at the time quite a revelation. We had thought that the main advantage of the hard disk would be that it held far more data than a floppy; the higher speed was a bonus.
We now have Ram in our notebooks that can hold more than those ancient drives. Nevertheless, the question of size and speed comes up all the time, mainly because they change so frequently.
