I'm a pretty newbie with hardware. But is the bottle neck on the interface bus speed, or the motherboard bus speed? Just using some random number as example: - HDD is at SATA 300MB/s (such as a WD5000KS) - I have a SATA controller card now to support the HDD - my CPU is a Intel 2.66Ghz, 512K, 533FSB isn't my CPU now and the motherboard bus speed the limitation now, that I can't gain the maximum performance of the HDD? I read the original posting, and it was helpful http://www.computing.net/hardware/wwwboard/forum/33616.html

Just wanna link the precise CPU spec of the one on my system. Intel 2.66GHz 512k Cachs 533MHz FSB - sSpec Number SL6DX: http://processorfinder.intel.com/scripts/details.asp?sSpec=SL6DX

The difference between a SATA I (150mb/s)and a SATA II (300mb/s) (two exact drives beside the interface) only have about 5%-10% performance gain over SATA I. Pentium 4 3.6Ghz Prescott Asus P5WD2 Premium Corsair XMS 2Gig DDR2 667Mhz X700Pro 256MB GDDR3 WD Raptor 36.7GB WD 250GB 16MB SATA II Coolermaster 430Watt I don't have a case yet I enjoy not having one

The biggest bottleneck these days is the "base" hard drive speed, then the hard drive interface speed. The 300mb/s rating of an SATA 2 drive, the 150mb/s rating of an SATA drive, the 133mb/s rating of an EIDE drive, etc. are all maximum "burst" speeds - they cannot be sustained over a long period of time . The data transfer rate after the "burst" speed max time has been exhausted is much lower than that - the "base" max speed. Max burst speeds can't be sustained for more than a few minutes, if they can even achieve that. Most of the time this doesn't matter much because a computer mostly transfers data in short bursts of time, and the larger on drive caches drives have these days and the "intelligent" routines built into the drive's board are a big help with that. So most of the time the bottleneck is the hard drive max interface speed.

And the max sustained speed for drives these days is well under 100mb/s. Sorry, I do not check for private messages

By tube's standard that is a good and well summarized one liner.....hahaha http://www.computing.net/gaming/wwwboard/forum/6723.html

It's a lot lower than 100mb/s. e.g. If you search using: sustained here: http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg/php/enduser/std_alp.php you will find the sustained data tranfer rate is e.g. 61 mb or less for current drives. For older drives it was even less. - e.g. 17 to 29 MB/Sec for thus SCSI drive that has a 3xx mb/sec "burst" rate. - detail here about sustained data transfer rates Sustained data transfer rates for SCSI hard drives (detailed overview). http://maxtor.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/maxtor.cfg/php/enduser/olh_adp.php?p_faqid=59 ....... "By tube's standard that is a good and well summarized one liner.....hahaha" He did say he was a newbie.