Now if we could just get SATAIII and 32mb buffers, the drives wouldn't even have to spin...
Please people, don't be sheep. SATAII itself does nothing for performance, and the point of diminishing returns for cache size is clearly reached before you get to 8MB. Knowing whether a drive has a "I" or "II" or "8" or "16" on it is useless psuedo-knowledge. If you care about performance learn how fast a drive is for your application rather than obsessing with trademarks, buzzwords, and spec-sheet BS.
I understand it's a lot harder, and you must understand that no number or group of numbers can come close to adequately describing a drive's performance. The performance of a hard drive is the composite of its performance in a nearly infinite number of different situations, and it is not feasible to test and numerically quantify an infinite number of possibilities. Stop looking for a shortcut to learning, and learn.
In the end a new drive will almost always bring a peformance boost, but that is because it is new, not because of the growth in the spec-sheet figures. They make new drives because they figure out how to make them cheaper, but fortunately the same things that make them cheaper also make them faster. If it's a year newer drive design, it will be faster, whether it spins faster, has a bigger buffer, has a II instead of a I, or not.
If you really want to know, buy the drive and test it in your machine and for your usage. Nothing else will really tell you the story. The next best thing is to examine the results others achieve, but you better know a lot about what you are looking at or you will have no way to correlate that to the results you yourself will obtain. And remember, in the end, no matter what the specs and no matter how cheap they (or you) are, no 7200rpm drive even performs on par with, much less outperforms, the Raptor 74.
The only thing that has changed is that the NCQ most SATAII drives employ is of minor benefit. Other than that STR has grown a bit and seek performance gotten a tad better. Just the same as the sort of advances seen per unit time for the last 10 years or so... If your drive is generations old, you will see nice benefits. But it is primarily because those generations have passed, not so much what form the hype surrounding each took.
And if you really care about performance, there are only two games in town. The Raptor74's massive seek advantage is still unassailable, and Hitachi makes, all-else-equal, the fastest hard drives. Only because Hitachi makes no 10,000rpm SATA drive is the Raptor king. If you want the fastest 7200rpm, get the Hitachi. Just don't fancy it truly equal to a competent 10,000rpm unit like the R74.
