Are there figures mentioned on the box anywhere (or should there be!) which
will indicate to the poor buyer (like wot I is) things like the access
time/transfer rate (like for DC-ROM drives) to help him/her decide?  As I
can't recall anyone mentioning this to me before (indeed the whole topic is
one I hadn't considered.... Duh) do manufacturers in general list these
performance figures on web sites, whatever.  Or are there break-points in
the technology march which we should seek to buy later than - akin to the
various flavours of DOS back in the good ol' days?  (Muddled, but I hope
you'll get the gist!)

Yooors,

Iain.

[SNIP]
>The hard drive (permanent storage) has always been a
>bottleneck in computers. That's the reason for disk caching
>software, on-drive caches, caching drive controllers, faster
>spinning motors, faster actuators, smaller physical sector
>size, wider/faster/smarter busses.  Access times are measured
>by milliseconds in hard drives, not nanoseconds as in RAM.
>If you use Windows 9x, which uses virtual memory (paging to
>disk), the system really slows down with an older hard drive.
>So, regardless of the platform, installing a much newer hard
>drive is as big a performance boost as adding more RAM.
>Regards,
>John Chin
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