The hard drive access speed, or latency, is far and away the most important
indication of performance.

The access speed is the "average" time it takes for the disk head to move to
the proper cylinder and
find the proper cluster to read.  For most disk accesses, especially with
fragmented files, the access
time will be significantly greater than the time to actually read the data
from the disk.

Imagine an old-fashioned record player.  Before you can play a selection,
you have to pick the head
up and move it to the right track on the record.  This is the access time.
If you hear a clicking sound
from your hard drive when it is being accessed, you hear the read head
moving about seeking the
data on different tracks.  This is like moving the arm on the record player
from song to song.

If you have to read a large file that is not fragmented, then the access
time diminishes in importance,
so, for some applications, it might not be as important.  But for general
computer use it is critical.

Dean Kukral   [log in to unmask]


----- Original Message -----
From: "Rocky Stio" <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, April 15, 2002 2:56 PM
Subject: [PCBUILD] Hard drive access speed?


> I will be building my first computer soon, and have a question about hard
drive
> selection. I know that size and platter speed are the selling points that
many go by, but somewhere I read about access speed being as important. Can
anyone delve into more detail? Thanks in advance! Rocky.

         PCBUILD maintains hundreds of useful files for download
                     visit our download web page at:
                  http://freepctech.com/downloads.shtml