Looking for a hard drive upgrade

[ShortThrow]

Couple Qs for you pros out there.

1. Any reason not to get an external HD to add on top of what I've got now?

2. Are all externals the same? No SATA/ATA/SATAII stuff? USB 2.0 good enough or is firewire preferred?

3. I'm looking for a large drive, something atleast 300gb; can you all recommend me some? I have xp home if that matters at all.

Thanks!

 

[TheMajor]

External disks are useful for back ups. External disks are regular disks. For a SATA disk you need an enclosure that supports SATA disks. For ATA disks you need an enclosure that supports ATA disks.

Firewire will give you the best performance, but USB 2.0 is fine, too.

 

[Mr. Switch]

the only reason I use my external HD is to transfer work from home to school. so portability is why you want an external drive. It it's going to stay stationary, go with an internal one.

 

[ShortThrow]

Another question,

Are Ultra ATA133 and Ultra ATA100 interchangable? What's the difference between the two?

 

[Michowski1]

ata 133 is faster then ata100. The 100's are way outdated now. 133 is still around and working great with speed and stability. Pick up an sata 3.0 hardrive or a nice ata 133 internal if its going to be stationary. Either one of those will be nice.

 

[TheMajor]

Another question,

Are Ultra ATA133 and Ultra ATA100 interchangable? What's the difference between the two?

Yes. You can connect an ATA100 hard disk to an IDE ATA133 controller, but it will work in ATA100 mode.
Or you can connect an ATA133 device to an IDE ATA100 controller but it will also work in ATA100 mode.

I don't know if an ATA133 device will be able to use 133MB/s if theres another ATA100 device connected to the same IDE controller/channel.

I am also wondering if the entire IDE controller bandwidth will be throttled down to 100MB/s when using ATA100 device(s). (I doubt it will).

If it would, an ATA133 IDE controller with 4 ATA100 disks would be faster than an ATA100 controller with 4 ATA100 disks. Say, all disks are transferring 33,25MB/s. 33,25 x 4 = 133MB/s (using all bandwidth). The disks on the ATA100 controller would be throttled down to 100MB/s MAX, so each drive could only use 25MB/s of available bandwidth.

The performance difference between ATA100 and ATA133 is small. Burst speeds will be higher, but average read/write speeds will only be slightly higher. Kinda like ATA133 vs SATA150.

As long as the disks are the same (besides the interface) there will not be a huge difference.
Seagate still uses ATA100 for many modern hard disks, even the high capacity disks (300, 400, 750 GB).

You will only use the entire IDE controller bandwidth when transferring from/to multiple disks at the same time, so when working with many disks, transferring a lot of data simultaniously, you should go with the best interface.

I wonder if copying files from disk A to disk B @ 40MB/s means it is using 80MB/s of bandwidth ("upload/download")

 

[ShortThrow]

Problem solved. Thanks guy. Mod can delete.