Hard Drive

What’s the fastest hard drive to get

 Not a great deal has moved over the years in relation to hard drives, what you need is a one or two terabyte drive that is SATA 2 certified along with 32 meg of cache, this is pretty much standard these days but check to ensure what you paid for is what you got as quite often your PC shop may accidently slip in some lower specification drive by mistake, if you know what I mean.

What bus speed i.e. how to fix the bottleneck problem with drives

 Ok, now you have one or two good drives scheduled for purchase, now for the bottleneck, this is the area that slows down the whole PC, it’s the communication between the hard drive and the rest of the computer, and this is managed via the computer motherboard, so it is here you should spend a dollar or two to ensure you get the latest and greatest, if you are buying the unit to cater to the i7 chip then it would be pretty much high spec as is but to be sure ask the question, what is the bus speed.

Look for a motherboard with high front side bus speeds, this is often represented as FSB and buy talking to your PC shop or looking at some hardware reviews for motherboards you will see that you can get them with speeds in the range of 2600 MHz, which is wonderfully fast.

To get the best speed from your drives and motherboard is achieved when you connect them to different channels (primary or secondary). If you' put them both on primary, then they have to share the bus so make sure you ask your technician / PC shop who is assembling your PC to make sure they put the drives on different channels ie the cable from the drive to motherboard can sometimes share a connector.

For home and most business applications the above would be suitable and more than likely exceeds standard business configurations.

Note that with business servers, these can be setup with smaller but faster drives (10,000 rpm) which are grouped together (striped) to act as one thus giving really fast read and write rates however for home applications where its video and internet related tasks these setups don’t add great value rather just additional expense and management time but can be fun to setup.