Question about hard drive specs
 

http://www.newegg.com/product/produc...82E16822148134

What exactly does Interface SATA 3.0Gb/s mean? Since that is not the transfer rate, what is it?

Actually I believe that what it is, the maximum tranfer rate but in bits. 3,000 Gigabits/sec divided by eight (since it takes 8 bits to equal a byte) comes out to 0.375 Gigabytes/sec. Or you can say its throughput totals to about 375 Megabytes per second (or more like 300 MB/sec due to the 8B/10B encoding.)
Still that's pretty fast =o.

Here's a wikipedia link for more info :).

SATA 3.0Gb/s == SATA II. Just another way of saying it. And, yes, it is referring to it's theoretical transfer rates. You will not get anywhere close to 300MB/s with SATA II drives unless you run 3 or more of them in a RAID0 configuration.

oh okay, I have a better understanding now, thank you both :)

yep, though it would take a few more than three drives to get over 300MB/s!

3.0 Gbps is the maximum speed of the SATA II bus.

Since were talking about HD's, I have a slightly different question. I'm on a laptop with either a 4200rpm or 5400rpm drive and I have an external USB2.0 drive which is 7200rpm. For gaming, which would be better?

Probably the internal, but its really a shot in the dark with out checking their speeds or knowing the specs of your hard drives.

if the game needs better sequential read rates, go for the usb drive, but if it needs lots of random access, go with the internal

actually i'd benchmark it. use hdtach and benchmark your external vs. your internal.