Getting a New Hard Drive

P11

P11

VIP Member
Hey, right now i have a 250gig Western Digital hard drive(IDE) . I am currently using it all for video recording and i decided to purchase another hard drive, now my question is whether i should another 250gig hard drive (IDE) or get a 250 gig (SATA). I have a Asus K8V-SE Deluxe..so im pretty sure it supports SATA but im not sure if i can use both IDE and SATA at the same time. Another question i have is if the SATA drive would benefit my gaming, such as CS:S, HL2:Lost Coast, F.E.A.R, NFSMW, and Call of Duty 2.

Thanks
 
Yes, you can use both a SATA and an IDE drive in tandem. SATA is actually quite noticeably faster (IMO) than IDE, and I've seen a leap in performance from PATA to SATA in gaming.

I will give fair warning, however, if you plan on using a SATA drive as the boot drive, you might have some problems (Windows XP requires special drivers from a floppy disc that usually comes with the motherboard to install, and Linux doesn't support all chipsets (which means if you had data on it it'd have to wipe it off).

That board only has SATA 150, right?
 
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P11 said:
so in other words, im better off using SATA as a slave..?
Click to expand...

Depends. If you have the correct drivers for XP than you can install Windows on it and should have no problems booting. Many people are succesful with this. However if you're not sure which drivers to use, or if you even have the right ones, it might require a bit of research before it works.

Personally I'm gonna use my SATA drive as my primary boot drive, I don't think there should be any problems. There are numerous guides online on how to setup a SATA drive to install Winows and boot and all that.
 
Since you already have everything set up on your IDE drive it would be easiest to use it as a slave, but if you really wanted that extra bit of performance and didn't mind extra work to get it, then you could set the SATA drive up as the primary and use the IDE drive as slave. If you're using XP you might have some frustration with activating it, and you'd have to reinstall all your programs, so I'd, minding the difficulties inherit to the alternate course of action, recommend just using the SATA as a data/game drive.
 
Could you suggest any SATA hard drive with 120+ Gigs?
P.S : Whats the difference between RAID 0, 1, 2?

Thanks
 
EDIT: aha neuro got a good one lok at is ^

RAID 0,1,2 etc are just different "configurations" of harddrives. Google "raid configurations" and you'll find a long and boring explanation of each. It's really not that complicated on the surface, striping/mirroring and such.

I just bought awestern digital 7200RPM sata drive, but i know they make larger capacity ones. i'm a Maxtor/Western Digital guy myself.
 
I have a Maxtor 160gb sata.

I didn't have to do anything (?) special - I just booted from the XP cd and installed clean. XP disk is pre-SP1, but the drive, mobo, etc are all brand new....
 
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