Talk:Drive Controller Types for the PC

comparison of drives technology

HARD DISK INTERFACES
  Transfer Rate
                  (MB per  Maximum
Type   Encoding**   sec)   Capacity
SATA/IDE  RLL    150-300    3TB
PATA/IDE  RLL      3-133    1TB
SCSI      RLL      5-320    300GB
SAS       RLL    375-750    2TB
                          Capacity
Older Interfaces           Range
IPI       RLL     10-25MB   200MB-3GB
ESDI      RLL      1-3MB    80MB-2GB
SMD       RLL      1-4MB   200MB-2GB
IDE       RLL      1-8MB    40MB-1GB
ST506 RLL RLL      937KB    30MB-200MB
ST506     MFM      625KB     5MB-100MB

S.M.A.R.T. and PRML

Seek and ECC errors are a less useful SMART statistic because of the differences between manufacturers. For example, every Seagate hard drive will display unusually high seek and ECC errors, typically 100 million or more.

Western Digital hard drives rarely ever report non-zero seek and ECC errors, and when they do show seek or ECC errors, the drive is already failing and reporting other errors.

PRML is Seagate’s proprietary method for statistical analysis of the data signal returned by the drive as it is converted back into the binary data stream.

source / reference / quoted from: http://jonrosensystems.com/2011/10/interpreting-s-m-a-r-t-data-from-hard-drives/

Interpreting S.M.A.R.T. data from hard drives by Jonathan M. Rosen - very insightful and an excellent read!