What is the transfer rate of a modern hard drive?

By that I mean on an average. On a non server spec hard drive. How fast can
it read data off the disk? There is a laptop here a work that can do 20MB/s
and a desktop that can do 58 MB/s so an AT100 interface is adequaqe ( ignore
burst modes and such ). So is there any speed benefit in using a SATA
interface. It also seems an AT133 isn't entirely necessary either except for
the most recent drives.

"Spacen Jasset" wrote...
By that I mean on an average. On a non server spec hard drive. How fast can it
read data off the disk? There is a laptop here a work that can do 20MB/s and a
desktop that can do 58 MB/s so an AT100 interface is adequaqe ( ignore burst
modes and such ). So is there any speed benefit in using a SATA interface. It
also seems an AT133 isn't entirely necessary either except for the most recent
drives.

You can benefit from SATA if you buy a HD like the WD Raptor that is
purpose-built to take advantage of the bus speed. Any 7200 RPM HD will be
limited by the spindle speed, so a 10,000 RPM HD will raise that limit somewhat.
Since HD mfgrs don't seem to be interested in making 10K RPM PATA HDs, SATA is
your next option; SCSI 320 with 15K RPM HDs come after that, but at a cost...