The four-platter drive has also got a massive 64MB cache, necessary, really, with that much space. You just need a brand new motherboard to use it—or add-on controllers, though it is backward-compatible with legacy SATA ports. Oh, and 300 US bucks. [Seagate, Image via Scoblizer]
matt
Tuesday, September 22, 2009 at 9:23 AMugh, please nobody thing that sata3 consumer harddrives will actually be faster than the sata2 ones.
sata2 has a bandwidth limit of 300MB/s, something no current consumer hard drive could hope to get near at the moment (think they are just over the 100MB/s sustained rate at the moment.)
64M of cache is more interesting, but nobody think this drive is going to go ‘twice as fast’ just cause its got sata3.
“As of April 2009 mechanical hard disk drives can transfer data at up to 131 MB/s,[8] which is within the capabilities of the older PATA/133 specification. However, high-performance flash drives can transfer data at up to 201 MB/s.[9] SATA 1.5 Gbit/s does not provide sufficient throughput for these drives.”