Hard drive specs, what's good, what's not?

When looking at hard drives, I notice several specs that seem to be important:
-Interface (ATA 66/100/133, etc.)
-Seek time (usually 8.9-9.4 ms)
-RPM
-Cache (2MB, 8MB, etc.)

I've looked at several hard drives and each one has different numbers in different areas so I'm curious as to which of these affects the overall system speed the most when playing games or multitasking.

I did do a search for this kind of information but with no luck.

ATA 133 is supposed to be the fastest reaching speeds of "133mbps" but usually only around 80 or so.

seek time, shorter is better

and 8mb cache is better than 2mb, i think its its kinda like ram for the hdd

Thanks for the reply.

I'm familiar with which numbers are better, individually, but I'm more curious as to how they interact with each other.

Example:
HD1 has an ATA 100/8MB cache while HD2 has an ATA 133/2MB cache. Which is better and why? Do the numbers even out in that case?

The order of importance for me depends on what the drive is being used for. For the OS, seek time(or for a more accurate value, disk access time), rotational speed, cache and then interface. The access time is vital due to the OS needing access to smaller files and/or pagefiles. Rotational speed ties directly into high IO values and disk access time. Cache is valuable for achieving burst rates and improving write access times. I rate interface last simply due to the drive's inability to utilize the full bandwidth of the bus. Most drives never reach ATA-66 theoretical performance levels and ATA-100 or better is common on all current drives.

Storage drives, I typically rate with a different set of criteria. RPM and cache to increase STR(sustained transfer rate) for larger files. Then, disk access times for responsiveness and interface rate last for the same reasons as above.

ATA 100 with 8mb cache is better.

ATA100 and ATA133 is exactly the samething.
Put that in an Intel system, you will see mode 5 ( which is ATA100 ), even the drive installed is ATA133 . If it was true theoretically ATA133 is 30% faster, then no one would run an Intel system since intel only support up to ATA100, beyond that, it still see as ATA100

Don't worry about ata 100 vs 133. Main thing you want to watch out for is at leat 7200rpm. 8mb cache is a very nice thing indeed. Low seek time is king IMHO.

My favorite drive right now is the western digital raptor. The 5.2ms seek time is crazy. These days most HD companies are reducing their warranties but this drive has a 5 year warranty on it. Its not an especially big drive but its perfect for my uses

Thanks for the replies everyone.

I ended up going with the WD 800 JB: 80 Gig, 8MB cache, ATA 100.

It will be here today