Importance of hard drive speed

dave1701

New Member
Ok, so I currently have 3 hard drives, all IDE. I'm gonna get a new motherboard with SATA connections, so I wass gonna get adapters to make them work with the motherboard. Will this make my hard drives bottleneck my PC? What if if it's only another non-windows hard drive?
 
Ok, so I currently have 3 hard drives, all IDE. I'm gonna get a new motherboard with SATA connections, so I wass gonna get adapters to make them work with the motherboard. Will this make my hard drives bottleneck my PC? What if if it's only another non-windows hard drive?
IMO, most IDE drives pose a bottleneck in general. It really depends what you're doing. I used to have a WD1200 IDE on my Core 2 Quad setup, and it didn't make CPU-intensive programs any slower than they should be, but it made all my programs load slower than they do with my new Spinpoint F3. It doesn't matter that your new motherboard only has SATA connections, but I recommend that you upgrade to this ridiculously fast (and cheap :)) Samsung Spinpoint F4:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...244&cm_re=spinpoint_f4-_-22-152-244-_-Product
 
The question you ask isn't as simple as saying yes or no. It depends on what you are running in your rig, and some other factors.

IDE (PATA) hard drives generally have a max throughput of 133MBps, SATA is capable of 150MBps, SATA2 at 300 MB/s, and SATA3 at 600 MB/s. Higher RPM drives will alter these speeds, as well.

Could you ever max out, or bottleneck, any of these forms? Running that Pentium 4, I would say probably not. However, I would research into this via the internet, ask a local pc shop, or wait for a more educated response.
 
two of your drives are really small dave, and even the 160gb isn`t very big, if you are getting a new sata board, why dont you sell all your old ide drives and that should get you enough to cover a new sata drive, you can get a 1tb sata drive for £40
 
First off, I wouldn't suggest getting those adapters. I hear they can be very finicky. If anything, get a controller card.

As for using the IDE drive, I wouldn't suggest it. As others have said, it will be quite a bottle neck. If you're running low on RAM and your HD is being used heavily for swap, the whole system is really going to crawl with an IDE.
 
Or get a board that has IDE and SATA ports, and clone the IDE drives to the SATA drives..
 
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