New Hard Drive Help (1 Viewer)

[Ted Lee]

parents....

might wanna leave that part out...

 

[DeathStar1]

aww come on, didn't mean it like that. Stop twisting my words

 

[Dave E H]

Check storagereview.com for good drive reviews. The Western Digital drives with 8MB buffer are currently the fastest available IDE drives.

Questions:

* Does ATA133 make a difference over ATA100 in this comparison? I've got a Maxtor ATA 133 drive (and my MB supports 133) and I need to add a second drive. Are these WD drives, even though they have use ATA100 still faster than the ATA133 drives (If they are, I'd assume it's mostly due to the cache.)

* I can mix & Match an ATA 133 & 100 in the same machine right? If I put them on the same channel, will it run at the slower speed? If I put them on different channels, will that allow one to run at 133 & one at 100?

 

[DeathStar1]

You know what... I didn't e ven begin to think what types my motherboard would support.

It was installed no more than 3 months ago, and is a P3 1GHZ, so I'm assuming that it can support all the latest hard drives... Is there anyway I can check to see who makes, and what model # my MB is without opening up the computer?

 

[Gabriel_Lam]

Questions:

* Does ATA133 make a difference over ATA100 in this comparison? I've got a Maxtor ATA 133 drive (and my MB supports 133) and I need to add a second drive. Are these WD drives, even though they have use ATA100 still faster than the ATA133 drives (If they are, I'd assume it's mostly due to the cache.)

* I can mix & Match an ATA 133 & 100 in the same machine right? If I put them on the same channel, will it run at the slower speed? If I put them on different channels, will that allow one to run at 133 & one at 100?

1. No. No ATA drive can transfer enough data to fill an ATA/100 interface. Your highest end ATA drive (the WD Caviar SE) can only push about 30MB/sec of data through most of the platter, given absolutely optimal conditions. They peak at about 45-50MBps at the outer edge of the platter with 0 fragmentation, under ideal circumstances. It would take 3 of these drives in a RAID 0 configuration to come close to saturating an ATA/100 interface with sustained transfer.

2. You can mix and match, but it would run at ATA/100, correct. Again though, it won't really matter.

 

[DeathStar1]

I REALLY hate living in a computer ignorant familly. My mother dosn't want to put it on her credit card, because she dosn't want my father to see it, even though she's getting MY money to pay for it. She thinks he'll think it's a waste of money, and none of them understand the need to update a 6 year old computer, and this is the last thing on the list.

I really hope the Rebate is still available tommorow, even though it says BETWEEN 9/27 and 10/03. That way, I can call in, confirm for my mother that the 80 GB drive is 99$'s with rebate, and then order it...

Sigh...

 

[DeathStar1]

Well, I used the levarage of a familly party, the fact that I would eventually be able to pay back the extra $50's, and the fact that my mother didn't want to be bothered while getting ready for it tonight, to finally convince her .
So, with 2 day shipping, I should be the proud owner of a new Western Digital 100GB 7200 RPM 8MB Buffer drive. Gads, I hope my new P3board has no problems with it, because I'll be oh so glad to ditch this 6 year old 10GB Hard drive.
Finally, no needing to uninstall all of my games due to space considerations!

 

[Gabriel_Lam]

Congrats. That WD SE drive is great.