Hard Drive Help reqd...

M

mapollo

New Member
I've recently built my own PC with the help mainly of people from this site. I used the Hard Drives I had from my scrapped Tiny PC which are a 20 gig Fujitsu and a 60 gig Western Digi WD600JB (7200) EIDE .

I'm ready to scrap (retire) the 20 gig drive and replace with something around 200 gb.

I have a Gigabyte motherboard GA-K8NF-9 which supports SATA.

So what would you do?

1. Just buy a 200gb IDE drive and use it with my 60 gb Western Digi drive (cost approx £65) or

2. Spend more : Go SATA and buy 2 drives maybe a 40 gb for my OS and a 200 gb for storage. (cost approx £105).

If I go SATA I wouldn't be able to use my existing 60gb Hard drive (I don't think) so my question is would SATA be worth the extra £ in performance. I use my PC for Internet,burning CD or DVD, and Photoshop mainly. No gaming (except for Spider Solitaire :D ).

Is it important to have 2 Hard Drives or could I make do with one say 250 gb Sata drive (cost £93) and partition it?

If it's relevant I have AMD Athlon XP 3200+ processor and 1 gig of RAM.

TIA David......
 
Not many drives can take full advantage of SATA yet. Unless you plan to get some really nice WD Raptors or something, I'd just stick with plain IDE.

Now, if you DO use Raptors, you'll get some killer speeds :D I got 216MB/s with my setup!
 
You can use SATA and IDE HDDs in combination. As for the number of drives, that's totally up to you. Like many people, I chose to have a separate HDD for data that I wish to preserve in case of HDD failure.
 
Now, if you DO use Raptors, you'll get some killer speeds :D I got 216MB/s with my setup!
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That must be a RAID0 and a burst transfer at that, the WD360GD averages 55MB/s sustained transfer and the WD740GD averages 72MB/s
 
I have plain old IDE ATA133. It may be a bit dated now but it works fine for what i want it to. Does anyone know the general speed of ATA133?
 
caps @133MB/s but you will only get close to that with burst transfers (from HD cache) sustained transfer will depend on the drive itself
 
Cromewell said:
we should probably stop hijacking this thread though :)
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Don't worry about that. I got all the Info I needed from the first couple of posts.
I haven't the £ for a Raptor set up so I will go IDE for now. If or when I upgrade to SATA I will still be able to use my new HD on the same system but I will just use it for backup.

Thanks for ALL the replies (except for the ones from Cromewell that is :) )
 
LOL, sorry mate, i must get into the habit of starting my own threads and not just leeching off others, ah well. Thanks for all the info cromwell.
 
LOL, sorry mate, i must get into the habit of starting my own threads and not just leeching off others, ah well. Thanks for all the info cromwell.
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Hehe yes indeed. Otherwise Admin and Mods arent too happy. And that's usually not conducive to a long and happy stay ;)
 
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