To be picky, it's true that 'spin speed and disk cache were no longer the key-overriding factors in the storage industry' however access time and transfer speed *are*, and they're closely related to spin speed and cache size.

Power consumption has been reducing regardless of supposed 'green' credentials, and many drives have the ability to restrict speed and thus consumption at the expense of performance.

Even if a system has 10 drives in it, greater efficiencies would be gained by energy efficient CPUs, better power supplies and the use of fewer expansion cards, plus of course that bane of power consumption : graphics cards, if it's anything other than a server with an embedded 2D only chipset.

Seriously. How many RPM do you expect from a FlashRAM drive, for example?

Tell me the average and maximum latency (aka "access speed") and the average and minimum transfer rate (both the reading speed and the writing speed, please. then I will have all the numbers I need to determine if HDD "A" is below, equal, or superior to HDD "B" for data storage uses. Also I want the MTBF; if I have to replace the drive every 2 years on average, vs. every 4 years for another brand, I need to know that.

If you want to tell me the average, maximum, and minimum power consumption as well, that will be nice (and tell me the total number of watts generated/wasted as heat, if you like), and I'll factor them in as appropriate.

But if I don't get the *performance* specs when designing a storage system, I'll go to a drive manufacturer who *will* tell me.

RPM and cache size are merely means to an end. Give me performance stats in metrics which make sense: time, and give me power statistics in a similar vein. It could spin at 1RPM for all I care if the access times make it irrelevant.

Wasn't it WD who were pushing the 10K RPM Raptor hard drive for use in high performance home PCs? Will they continue to make it?

Been a boffin for 20 years. Never seen any electronic device perform to spec. Never seen marketing specs that have ever had real world performance information.

Marketing specs (like RPM) are, and always have been, utterly meaningless.

And no, Maxtor is not infrior to Seagate. In twenty years of buying and selling harddrives, only Seagate have failed early and regularly. So much so I refused to buy them again until only recently, and that is only because the HDD industry has become much like the OS industry. Bought out and dominated by one (inferior) player.

Now if we can convince Intel to drop the Spin, the world might be a better place. But, then again, there would be far fewer Intel machines out there (as it is inferior tech).

Didn't Seagate buy Maxtor in late 2005/early 2006?

Yes they did. And now the only difference between the Seagate and Maxtor is the label and firmware (for branding purposes only). They've gone with Seagate in terms of physical design.

I need to replace a HDD yet again. Its the one-in-five drives that's Seagate.

Its name on my rig is 'seasick' to remind me not to put anything essential in it.

All I want to know it how long will it last, spin speed is on no consequence if it is reasonably quick on data transfer.

Or am I supposed to be impressed with spin-speed? Perhaps I'm not a geek after all.!

BIA