Information on Data Transfer Issues

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risingTide

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Greetings,

I'm looking for information on the bottlenecks of data transfer. For example, I'd like to find some kind of chart or table or something that shows different Seek Speeds, Rotational Speeds, Interface, Buffer, etc. and what the potential problems problems are when transferring video, images, etc.

All this is coming from a need to purchase a particular external hard drive so I'm trying ramp up my knowledge base again. I've heard that there are some nice charts like that out there but I can't find any.

Can anyone point me to a link or something?

Many thanks,
bryan
 
Those things aren't really relevant with todays drives... consider 5400 rpm vs 7200 rpm vs 10,000 rpm... then get the largest cache buffer you can find.
They usually come in 2 mb, 4 mb, 8 mb, and 16 mb buffers.
You will find some charts on the websites of Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital, and Samsung.
I recommend you stay away from Hitachi, Tri-Gem, Fujitsu, and Maxtor due to reliability features, and their high failure rates from relatively small lateral impact on an external drive. In fact, i would get only a Seagate or Western Digital with a 16 MB buffer.
 
However, I was told that you have to be aware of that type of thing when transferring video because you can loose frames? You're saying that's not relevant with a 7200rpm anymore??

I was leaning towards a Seagate so that sounds good.
 
The only time you can lose frames is if you are importing video from firewire which fortunately or unfortunately happens in realtime. So if your disk can't keep up you will lose frames. I suppose the same could be said about playback, but and that could be due to a processor incapable of handling playback or a slow disk.

Any modern hard drive can take those speeds. Your processor might be too weak if thats happening to you.

But for straight drive to drive copies, you don't lose frames like that. Copies make identical copies, they don't drop parts out.
 
Thanks for the info...that makes a lot more sense to me...I'm not sure about what I was told from the other source. Perhaps I misunderstood what he was saying.

On a related note...I did find some decent charts for the kind of thing I was looking for. They're not totally comprhensive, but perhaps they would help someone else.
They are from Western Digital and Samsungs sites like raybay suggested

Western Digital Page

Samsung Page
 
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