Hard Drives - IDE, SATA, SCSI???? What the? What the?

[Mr. tech]

I want to buy a new hard drive... Whats the differences between IDE, SATA and SCSI?

I plan to put it on a PC running Intel P4 with a windows install...

 

[Mr. tech]

Also, what brand is most reliable?

 

[john3]

IDE is the old type of Hard drives, they have big cables and are slower,i believe. SATA are the new faster hard drives, and the cables are small, and SCSI are the hard drives with speeds of 15,000Rpm i think. you want a SATA, and either Western Digital or Seagate is fine. if you can afford it, get a raptor.

 

[Apokalipse]

Seagate have the lowest failure rate.

SATA and IDE use much of the same technologies, but have a different way of transferring data. you need at least XP SP2 to use a SATA hard drive, or you need to install drivers.

SCSI is very fast, and very expensive. used in servers mainly, where things just have to be fast.

 

[turtile]

SCSI is the most reliable. Most drives are meant to run at full load for millions of hours.

Sata is the new standard for IDE (mostly consumer drives)

 

[PZEROFGH]

Not only is it faster from going from SATA to IDE, You won't have that big bulky IDE cable in your case blocking airflow. Now you have super thin sata cables :classic:

 

[Mr. tech]

OK, I just bought a 200GB SATA... I'm going to be replacing my current HD with this new one however I don't have enough time to do it all in one day... So I will have to be switching from the OLD hard drive to the new one several times this week.

Is that OK to do? Will the motherboard cope having a new hard drive a few times a day?

 

[reggie_da_man]

It's fine to switch out hard drives. They actually have a 5 1/4" bay where you can have a hard drive and just pull it out. SCSI also have huge 50 pin cables instead of IDE with 40 pins.