Why Hard Disk Drive Speed is Important?

Speed counts when it comes to hard disks. Especially if you are into the video editing and hardcore gaming. When you go to buy a PC or are thinking of upgrades, the hard disk speed is not really very high on your priority. As long as there is 320 GB/500GB of space that is available within the budget, most people dont care any further. Often the PC fits into your budget because the dealer is giving you a hard disk that uses technology that is bit old which translates into a slower disk and a slow PC. Specially if you want to do multitask heavily or would like to play high end games. You will not be able to notice any problems if you are checking mails or working on MS Word simply. But as soon as you start playing 3D games, or open up any video in video editing software plateform and edit bits and pieces of it, things start slowing down.

A Hard disk performance depends on two things – speed of the hard disk and the interface with which it connected to the rest of the PC. The speed of the hard disk is measured in rpm – rotations per second. That is the number of rotations the spindle of the hard disk can complete within a minute. The speeds you will come across commonly are 7200 rpm. You can even get hard disks with the speed of 10000 rpm or more. For something as heavy duty as video editing software’s,while multitasking basic speed must be 7200 rpm.

The speed of hard disk also covers the data rate and the seek time. Data rate is amount of data that the drive can deliver to the processor in a second. Most hard disks deliver 5-80 MB per second. For perfect video editing you should look for 20MB/s minimum.What is seek time in hard disk drive ? -  Seek time is the time hard disk takes to get a file to the processor, once you have asked for it. It varies between 10-50 milliseconds. The shorter the seek time, the faster you see the file open up on screen. The interface also plays a huge part in determining the speed of a hard drive. Latest Hard disk Drives are coming with SATA 6Gb/s interface. So be sure to ask the interface of the hard disk you are getting.The new interface in town is SATA and brings about a huge increase in performance.