Harddrives. Which to choose?

[PersianMafia]

I'm in search of a 120-200GB HDD for my storage uses. I will be storing documents, music, movies, games and setup files on that HDD. I currently have a Seagate SATA 80gb drive and I want to know what is the most efficient kind of drive to buy. PATA, SATA or external Firwire/USB2. What do you guys think. I wont be doing any RAID so is there no use in wasting money on Serial ATA or are SATA drives better and faster? What about external, are their lifespans long and do they have good dependebality. I'm speaking about good brand drives such as maxtor, seagate, wd etc, and not about cheap brands that make these drives.

Thanks for any help.

 

[Northbridge]

SATA is the fastest type of hard drive . RAID does help hard drive performance , but only minimally .

 

[koldapu]

brand - wise . . .

i like seagate . . .

theyre really good, and the ones i have are quiet

 

[Apokalipse]

I think all 7200RPM Seagate drive's are designed to be extremely quiet, if not silent.

Seagate drives are some of surprisingly few that run natively in SATA, other drives that 'adapt' to SATA from PATA will only run at 100MB/S even though their rated bandwith is 150. also, problems have been known to occur through the data transfer when it is converted to and from the SATA interface, and some of your data will become corrupt

 

[Apokalipse]

koldapu, in your sig you have
PCIx16 Card
I think you mean PCI-E or PCI-Express
you're right that the PCI-E graphics cards will run in a 16x slot though, at least at first they will

 

[didi]

Just get a SATA hardisk with 7200rpm n 8MB cache/buffer.
Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital doesnt matter cosz all most the same except the prices difference a bit.

 

[koldapu]

thanks for the grammar correction

 

[Apokalipse]

Just get a SATA hardisk with 7200rpm n 8MB cache/buffer.
Maxtor, Seagate or Western Digital doesnt matter cosz all most the same except the prices difference a bit.

well they're not all the same, Seagate's and WD's are known for their quality, but I know that Seagate's are the only one of the 2 that have SATA drives that run natively in that interface, and so they don't get data corruption and get the full 150MB/S instead of just 100

 

[geo3tech]

what do you guys do with all that 200 GB crap

i have rapter 10,000 rpm 8mb/cache at 36gb and still running with about 15 gb extra storage. you guys must have like thousands of games and programs

i have like 5 must have games and must have programs too

 

[compy]

usaly video and music files take up that much space.