low down on HDs

[souschef]

I'm looking to get a hard drive for a pc I'll be building. It will be for a 939 board.

I've seen the seagate barracuda 7200.7 80GB recomended. I think that is what I'll get, but I was wondering if that will work in my current pc, it is an older socket 462. It would be nice to use it until I get money for the cpu and video card of my new rig.

I haven't seen a good break down of what the diffrent harddrive interfaces mean.

If anyone could explain this I'd appriate it.

PATA 2 x ATA 133 up to 4 Devices
PATA RAID NV RAID 0/1/0+1 JBOD
SATA 4 x SATA 150
SATA RAID NV RAID 0/1/0+1 JBOD

 

[Ste]

If your PC is older then lets say 5-6 years, you will probably need to flash BIOS and upgrade to SP2 or later if you have XP to see drives larger then 137 GBs.

Now there are tons on different interfaces with varying speeds and such. So Ill just try to answer your question.

PATA is an older but still popular interface, it was first introduced some 15 years ago, it stands for parralel Advanced Technology attachement. . 133 Describes the speed, Currently for PATA drives 133 is the fastest Speed.

With anything faster then 33, you will need to use an 80 conductor ribbion cable, the connector will still be 40 Pins though.


RAID= Redundant array of independant drives, meaning multiple drives can be combined into 1, to provide faster file read times and more space. There are many types of RAID such as Raid 0 which is stripping and Raid 1 which is mirroing.

SATA is Serial ATA, ATA meaning Advanced Technology attachment.

The 4 x means you have 4 SATA connectors, so you can connect up to 4 drives.

With PATA there are only two 40 pin connectors but each ribbion cable can connect up to 2 harddrives or 2 optical drives.

SATA is a newer Harddrive technology which provides faster transfer speeds and much smaller cables, It is also Plug And Play meaning that no user interaction is needed to configure it. You can also unplug a SATA drive while computer is on, but it is not reccomeneded.

The Sentences with RAID in them mean your motherboard Supports RAID configurations with either SATA or PATA drives.

EIDE Drives connect using PATA.

So you can either buy an EIDE harddrive which is perfectly fine, or you can buy a SATA harddrive which is a newer technology and is also perfectly fine.

 

[souschef]

Thanks for the crash course in harddrive interfaces.

 

[kmote]

simple, if your motherboard has SATA connectors on it, your PC should support SATA, if it doesnt then it doesnt.

 

[souschef]

Right but I'm not sure what a SATA connector looks like, and don't have a manual for my current mobo.

I'f I'm understanding Ste correctly my older PC most likely has an EIDE drive connecting though a PATA interface. So if I buy a SATA drive for my new pc it will not be backwords compatable, which is fine, I'd rather have the newest technology supported by the motherboard I'm planning to buy. I just won't buy it until I buy the other compontents as it would be of no use to me now.

 

[Ste]

SATA connectors are much thinner then Ribbion cables and they are usally Blue or Red in color.

They have a small connector on the end about the size of a stapler head or smaller.

The width of the cable is no bigger then a Pen or 2 side by side.

 

[souschef]

I belive my connector is blue, I think it is labeled IDE 1 (if that matters). I'll have to check when I get home from work. I'm also thinking the HD it will have markings that will indicate if it is SATA or EIDE. (should have thought of that before)

 

[Lonewolf5460]

thats how it looks got to love google

 

[souschef]

ha! thanks matt, that is definitely not what I have on my older board.