Hard Drives

[StrifeX]

Okay i have been researching on building my pc and i understand how the whole graphics card and processor sockets and slots work...But i have no idea on how to tell the difference in Hard drives like IDE, SATA, RAID and all that stuff some one help i dunno what kind of hard drive to get...do i base it on the Cache size or something else Help please?

 

[m3trj]

IDE and SATA are different interfaces. An IDE hard drive will probably work with any motherboard, and it's old technology. Most hard drives are like this. SATA is Serial ATA. It's slightly faster than IDE, and if your motherboard supports it you can use a SATA hard drive.

RAID is done with multiple disks. You can have two disks mirrored so that if one fails you can use the other, and some other stuff. I don't know a lot about it.

 

[geffin]

I'll continue on RAID. It was originated as server technology, like mt3rj said, raid systems are mirrored. for example, if you have 4 harddrives of the same stature (lets say 20gb), and you set them up in a raid array, you have either choice, to use data stripping, or data mirroring. Stripping basically takes a file that is being written to the hard drive, and splits it (in this case) into four parts, and places a part on each drive. Mirroring, on the other hand, places the file on all four drives. So basically a raid system turns multiple drives into a single drive "system". Oh yeah!, you can tell the difference between drives by: IDE=big ribbon cable, whereas SATA=Small thin cable with a black head (usually).

 

[StrifeX]

thanks so much for teaching me. Now i need to understand what this whole deal is on buffer and cache things anyone?