Question: Which component of your PC is the slowest?

Most probably the answer to that question is the Hard Drive.  While rotation speeds have graduated from 4200RPM to 15000RPM, the hard drive continues to be the component that makes you curse your PC while endlessly waiting for Windows to finish swapping files. Increasing your systems memory certainly helps in gaining performance, but you still need to load an application from the hard drive to the memory.

Today, we take a look at four hard drives- from the now standard 7200RPM to the latest 10000RPM and even the high-end 15000PRM SCSI. We’ve tested each of these drives in Single and RAID 0 configurations. Lets introduce our contestants for this round-up.

	Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 Capacity: 80GB Rotational Speed: 7200RPM Buffer Size: 8MB Interface: Serial-ATA Warranty: 1 Year
	Maxtor Atlas 15k Capacity: 36GB Rotational Speed: 15000 RPM Buffer Size:  8MB Interface: SCSI Warranty: 5 Years
	Western Digital Raptor 740GD Capacity: 74GB Rotational Speed: 10,000 RPM Buffer Size: 8MB Interface: Serial ATA Warranty: 5 Years
	Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 Capacity: 160GB Rotational Speed: 7200RPM Buffer Size: 8MB Interface: Serial-ATA Warranty: 3 Years

We took all the above drives and benchmarked them in Single and RAID 0 modes. Besides the scores, we also measured the sound level and the heat produced by each of these drives. Lets introduce our test bed and get down and dirty straigh away.