Hard drives

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Mandingo

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Can someone explain the difference between a regular hard drive and a sata. I have 1 sata hard drive and I want to use it for everything I have...Operating system, games, music..... Will this be ok? Im lost on the definition of a sata hard drive. I also want to use it with the serial ata cable. Can I do that?
 
Serial ata is sata. As you put it, a normal harddrive, you will probally be refering to IDE. IDE has a slower transfer rate, but they do not even use the full bandwidth that IDE has, so Sata will not be that much faster, but you get the thinner cables. The reason that sata is faster is because you can have raid on different channels (with ide it has to be on the same cable for raid, so it is limited by bandwidth, and it can't read and write at the same time.

You will have no problems using one sata harddrive for everything. The only thing is, you may want to create a partition for the games, but it doesn't imprive speed, just makes it a bit cleaner on your os harddrive.
 
4 questions.
#1 On the back of the seagate 80gb sata HD there is 2 places for cables, 1 is for the small cable(sata) and the other is a spot for a wider cable. What is the wider cable for? (I dont even have a cable for that one)
#2 How does the HD get power? from the small sata cable?
#3 How do I make a seperate partition for games and get the games on that partition?
#4 What raid can I set my hard drive up as if I am only using 1?

P.S. I will be getting another hard drive when the money is flowing again and I will set it up as raid 0.
 
That wider slot is for a sata power cable, if your psu does not have one of them, you will need to get a adapter. They are quite cheap.

#3 You create partitions when installing windows xp.

#4 You can not use RAID with one harddrive.
 
that's not true, if his psu has no sata power some SATA drives have connectors for 4 pin molex or w/e, mine's a 120gb WD and has both 4pin and sata power
 
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