I'm amazed at how cheap hard drives are now. Instead of cleaning up an older HDD to free space, you're better off just plunking down a little cash to get 10 times the disk space in a new HDD for $50-$100.
SATA is very impressive with up to 3.0Gb/sec transfer rates these days. With that kind of speed, it makes older ATA-100 and ATA-133 HDD's look like primitive technology. But, if you're just a home user doing periodic backups, it's kind of overkill. At this point, I'm still perfectly fine with a 1Gb file taking a few minutes to transfer (instead of a few seconds). Plus, once you start heading out through FireWire and USB ports, the SATA benefit diminishes (the slower device is the equalizing bottleneck).
So, for those of us still mucking around with pre-SATA, I'm wondering... is there an appreciable difference between ATA-100 and ATA-133, assuming the same rotational speed (e.g. 7200rpm)? Or is it so slight as to be negligible?
