At 12:06 PM -0800 1/24/2011, peterh...@cruzio.com wrote:
Yet, the average throughput capacity of most drive electronics and host
bus adapter electronics remained essentially the same, at about 40
megabytes/second, MAXIMUM.
This is not about raw or sustained throughput. If all people did was
a single latency/seek cycle then read or write whole cylinders,,,
then the rotational speed of a drive would not matter so much. The
bottleneck would be the interfaces and buffers.
But that's just not the case.
People rarely read/write whole tracks at once on a HD. They grab a
few sectors then WAIT for that latency and seek cycle, grab a few
other sectors then WAIT for that latency and seek cycle, grab a few
other sectors then WAIT for that latency and seek cycle, etc.
Those WAIT cycles are soooooo long, the net effect is that it doesn't
matter how fast the actual read/write time is on the drive, or the
interface speeds (once they're fast enough)... what matters is how
long YOU are bored to death waiting for your system to gather all the
data you need.
A faster rotational speed = shorter latency = shorter wait times =
higher performance.
- Dan.
--
- Psychoceramic Emeritus; South Jersey, USA, Earth.
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