your cable speed (The SATA) is the 'bandwidth' so obviously it'll perform better if information moves through a faster cable. You you HDD can transfer 5000Mbps but with it wont transfer that if you cable that is used to transfer is slow as s**t. Understand? And 7200rpm doesn't tell you anything about the speed of the HDD. Just so you know.

If the drive is a sata2 drive, using it in a sata3 port will not boost the speed. The interface on the drive will only do 3Gbits/s, even if the port on the board can do 6Gbits/s.

Transfer rate too depends upon rpm ah ! Combined by factors like quality of disk in hdd, power supply , materials used for creating pci of hd , quality of casing as disk are sensitive to external envioroment and type of motherboard and yup those sata cables and at ends processor

i am asking because on windows 7 experience index i usualy get 5.9 for the harrdive. and i want more. i will wait till jay and spartan leave their comments.

the win 7/vista, experiance is bugged with very little variation on the drive number a ide 5200rpm drive can give the same rating as a 1000rpm raid config. si it realy is near usless for a performance measure. hd tune is the only realy reliable method to test a drive and its speed. the drives transfrer speed is down to its udma mode if its sata in some cases rpm means nothing. some 7200 rpm drives

like the samsung spinpoints can burst mode faster than 1000rpm drives. giving 250-300MBps with an average read write speed of 120-140MBps on a single drive, while other drives with higher rpm can only burst to 133MBps because they have a lower udma.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parallel_ATA

So if i get a normal 7200rpm hitachi 32mb cache harddrive its not going to slow my pc down which i am building? And jay after all this discussion i have decided to buy a 5850 ati if theres stock in south africa suppliers.

sonic RPM doesn't mean anything. Stores advertise the rpm to add emphasis on the HDD. Its a way of making sales.

erm! no need for facepalm, sonic is rite in that a pc is only as good as its components.

facepalming because of he said transfer speed depends on rpm. It doesn't.

and the obviously a HDD depends on its 'external bus' which is the SATA cables and the motherboard, CPU, RAM etc. No facepalm for that.

and is a 64mb cache much better on a harddrive than a 32mb cache?

it helps with read write speed but has little overall performance gains from 32mb

hw did u guys knw al dis stuff ?@ sonic ,jay ,oetinger n othas ...i knw thes google ,bt realy gentlemen- do u build em or wat?