Best speed out of a HDD

[rcrevolution]

ok heres my delima, I currently have a 40Gb HDD ata/133 and a 160Gb ata/133

the 160Gb I only keep music and dvds on so that can stay.
but I need a faster HDD to have my games and programs.

so which HDD type is the fastest I can get? I beleive it is SATA but I can be wrong.

and is it possible to find a 200Gb HDD for under $200 which is SATA
doesnt matter on the rpms (10,000 perferably)
and i would also like it to be quite and have a fast seek time.

also what performance boost can I be seeing from this faster HDD compared to my ata/133
will my games and programs load quicker, and will my windows boot time go down?

[Coconut Monkey]

Either the 160Gb or 40Gb would be fine as one of the main system drives.
If you require additional space however, then a standard 7200rpm SATA drive of some capacity from Seagate, Western Digital or Maxtor should serve you well. I wouldn't bother with a 10000rpm model - the extra cost and reduced storage capacity isn't worth the minimal decrease in load times.

[rcrevolution]

well I found a western digital and a maxtor both 200GB 7200rpms and sata , how does that sound?

my current primary hdd is a 40GB ata/100 old emachines HDD which serverly needs to be upgraded.

will a 200Gb sata hdd perform slower then a 160Gb sata hdd? and if so will the difference be great?

have a quick question too, will SATA II work in regular SATA?

[rcrevolution]

still need help here

[jifiii]

Well it will have some effect with the bigger HD, since it has to search through my sectors on the platter, but you will see very little difference in performace.

[rcrevolution]

either way the sata 200Gb will load faster then my 40Gb ata/133 right?

[rcrevolution]

http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-148-033&depa=0

I was looking at that,

is that a decent drive, and will it be loud? Like my maxtor 160Gb ata/133 makes like grinding sounds when write (nothing is bad its just loud) will that HDD makes those same sounds?

[alc6379]

Did you check the reviews? they'd be the best things to consider befure purchasing the drive.

Now, I do just want to elaborate on something here. SATA150 is only 17MB/s faster than ATA/133. While it is a speed increase, I don't think you're going to experience some huge speed jump by installing a "faster" drive. At least, not some appreciable difference.

jifiii and Coconut Monkey are right-- pick a drive based on how much space you need. you're not going to get too much faster by having SATA drives.

[Dani]

Just to add, RPMs aside, SATA does not go through the standard IDE bus that IDE/Parallel ATA drives do. I'm not sure how big of an impact that makes on performance.