clavus

My massive 80Gig Hard Drive doesn't seem so very large three years later. I want to add a second HD. I've never done this before. How do I know what will work with my machine? I see -

Serial ATA interface
Ultra ATA interface
Parallel ATA interface

Huh?

My Mobo is - ASUS nForce2 - A7N8x revision
My CPU is a AMD XP 2700+

Any suggestions?

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Destrox

Essentially Ultra ATA is the same thing as Parallel ATA aka IDE aka UATA aka PATA blah blah. A older standard.

Your mobo supports 2x SATA connections, and SATA is the newest.

Now I dont know if your current drive is SATA or PATA, I'll assume PATA being 3~ years old.

Speed/quality wise go with SATA. (The sata drive really should be your OS drive though, a sata for storage and PATA for OS is a bit of a backwards thing.)

SATA is the new standard pretty much, and they are fairly cheap.

400+ gig for $120~


New Egg SATA Drive Listing


---- Edit ----

Come to think about it, the best thing for you if you can take the hit.

Buy a SATA drive of say... 350/500 gb. Partition it so its like 80gb / 200 / 200 (at least this is what I do so Defragmenting goes a bit smoother and quicker on the drives i need them to be.)

Reinstall Windows on the 80gb, and keep you older drive (still has all the data on it) and copy stuff over.

It makes for a easier fresh start, and you'll have a MUCH faster drive. (Assuming your old drive is not SATA!)

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Jinn

Just in case you're looking for a second opinion, what Destrox has said is exactly what I'd say. PATA = ATA = IDE, old. SATA = new, good, fast. Use it for OS partition.

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Glory's Sun

Fry's has 500gb Seagate SATA's on sale for $119 with free shipping.

I however purchased 4 750gb SATAs. You need to go with SATA for speed and storage.

God of Thunder

Stay away from Maxtor!!

We send at least one Maxtor back to Dell per week here. My experience has show them to not be a reliable drive at all.

My personal preference is Western Digital or Seagate.

I'm sure we could spark a whole separate thread on Maxtor vs. WD vs. Seagate, but my personal $.02 worth is to stay away from the Maxtor drives.

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Glory's Sun

Afuckingmen!!

I hate Maxtor drives. We send a ton back to dell as well. I prefer Seagate to WD but I don't mind either one.

Good lookout.

Jinn

I third the hate for Maxtor.

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DaveOrion

I run dual 160 gig seagate barracuda HD's, both 7200 rpm. Both are partitioned, one is a sata and one pata. I can tell no difference in speed between the 2, and most people never will. The only way to see the difference is to benchmark the drives. If you can afford the sata, then I'd go with that, but a pata is going to be cheaper and most likely you'll never know the difference.

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Jinn

A big factor in noticing the speed of your drive, Dave, is to play games intense on your RAM. If you're paging to the hard drive (likely on high end games, even with 2 G RAM) you'll notice the speed every time it does a read or write (which is very often).

Just general file movement, you probably wouldn't notice it, tho, you're right.

Unless you're unzipping a 1200 file RAR.

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Lasereth

I remember a couple of years ago THG benchmarked SATA versus old ATA and both were the exact same speed. The cable allows faster bandwidth but in the end they're the same. What DOES make a difference is the fact that most newer and faster hard drives just happen to be the SATA interface. Fast because of the way they're built, not fast because they're SATA. Unless you buy a Western Digital Raptor (then it's the drive AND the SATA interface making it fast).

I've had good and bad drives of every HDD manufacturer and definitely have not noticed one being better than the other.

The older style non-SATA HDDs will work on your PC fine but there will be some configuring of the physical jumper on the hard drive depending on where you put it on the actual hard drive cable. SATA hard drives require no physical configuration, but you might have to install the SATA drivers onto your PC to make the HDD work in Windows. Either way it's an easy task.

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Dilbert1234567

to clean some of this up, IDE and ATA are both part of PATA and SATA. P/S it is just the method of transfer between the IDE and the controller on the motherboard, serial or parallel.

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epoxy27

another plug for seagate. if memory serves me, they have a 5 year warranty.

as a maxtor slam, i had 2 identical maxtor drives that had crazy problems, including watching the circuit board catch fire. believe me, that was a scarey moment, that fortunitly didn't cause any major additional problems. lets just say that since then, maxtor has NOT been my go-to brand.

cyrnel

I was a longtime PATA holdout, but the last two years have seen measurable speed improvements in mid-range drives and motherboard performance. Single drives, especially those using perpendicular recording, now benefit from the additional SATA bandwidth. If there's any chance the 2nd drive would go on the same PATA channel there would be a fairly large gain using SATA for the 2nd drive.

There are still reasons to buy PATA drives, but not many.

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connyosis

Yet another vote for Seagate. Using a 250 gig Seagate SATA drive for Linux and an old 40 gig Seagate IDE for windows, both work excellent and has never given me any problems.

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MikeSty

I have four dead drives in my storage box. One maxtor, two WD, one a hitachi laptop deathstar.

Seagate is amazing. The only problem I've had is when I smashed the drive electronics on my 80GB drive I'm running. Uhhh.. it still works, but it has trouble now and then.

SATA is definitely the way to go. Easier cabling, and most of all, easier to build snap-together RAID solutions. Plus, isn't SATA hot swappable?

Dilbert1234567

the SATA standard is hot swappable, but the controller has to support it as well.

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Redjake

Maxtor has been great to me. I have 3 160 GB maxtors, a 200 GB maxtor, and a 300 GB maxtor, and none of them have shit out yet. The first 3 160s are 4 years old, and have been used heavily.

Only HD I've had shit out on me was a Western Digital

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cyrnel

Aye, this drives people nuts. While the hardware won't generally have any problem with being swapped, the driver has to specify the attached drives as removable or else swapping means a restart. The simple answer is to look for "supports hot swap" when buying your controller. Many of the low-end cards do not, most notably the jungle of sub-$50 Silicon Image based cards.

Whatever drive you buy, make sure you're getting the best warranty available. I don't mean you should buy additional coverage, just make sure you get the best coverage offered by that manufacturer for that drive. The usual boxed retail packages sold by office chains include a $1 cable and screws but only a 1 year warranty, while the same drive packaged bare as "OEM" has a 3 or even 5 year warranty. This varies so do your homework.

Even if you have a warm & fuzzies about a favorite brand, remember: they all fail. If you don't back up, they'll get you eventually. A second drive is extraordinarily cheap compared to the effort and expense of recovery.

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There are a vast number of people who are uninformed and heavily propagandized, but fundamentally decent. The propaganda that inundates them is effective when unchallenged, but much of it goes only skin deep. If they can be brought to raise questions and apply their decent instincts and basic intelligence, many people quickly escape the confines of the doctrinal system and are willing to do something to help others who are really suffering and oppressed." -Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media, p. 195

DaveOrion

I had a 80 gig maxtor in my previous computer and it worked fine for years with very heavy use. Its just like cars, if you have a ford crap out on you, most likely you'll never buy one again. I like pontiacs because I've always had good luck with them, other people may hate them, thus is life.

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Dilbert1234567

yeah, i charge $100 per hour for data recovery... some of the job's get into the thousands, have a backup of anything you can't afford to lose.

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yippiekiyeh

I choose Seagate for their long 5 yr warranties. Also, now that Maxtor is owned by seagate, they too have 5 yr warranties!

Just something to think about.

Destrox

I've had 3 WD'd Die on me. (all within 2 years of purchase)

1 MAxtor (it was 20gb and 6+ years old of abuse)

and never had Seagate die.

Personally I only buy Seagate and Maxtor, Seagate gets the upper hand unless the Maxtor drive is a price I cant deny.

Than again I still have some 200mb drives that work, go figure.

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clavus

OK, I think we all missed an important detail. If your boot drive (the one w/ your OS) is IDIE, you can not make your machine recognize a second drive if it is SATA. You gotta have another IDIE. Or at least this is what I was led to believe after a long adventure of installing, updating, screwing with BIOS, researching, calling friends, de-installing, driving all over the place, returning, buying another drive and eventually PAYING somebody just to make the &*$%#! work.

Fucking A. No matter how prepared I think I am, I always get my ass kicked by something like this.

Thanks for the effort. Before today, I didn't even know IDIE from KFC. Now I know.

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Dilbert1234567

well, no. all you have to do is install the SATA drivers, then force the system to re detect the mass storage devices on the next boot, shut it down, image the PATA drive to the SATA then boot the SATA.

except in one rare exception, if the system board does not allow you to boot from a sata device.

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Jetée

Alright I feel as though this thread has been very informative and full of options on how to choose the ideal hard drive for a pc , but I own a laptop.

Does this complicate the problems further if my meager 60gb(~45gb) can no longer handle much more memory?

I have been looking for a good-priced external HD for my laptop so that I can free up some space on my drive for only the essentials, and all the rest of my music, movies, etc. can be transferred to the external drive.

But the problem therein lies that I have heard that external HD can be quite expensive and of high-maintenance. After talking to some friends of mine, one offered the suggestion to just buy an internal hard-drive for the reason that they can be significantly cheaper and easier to maintain than their external counterparts.

My question is this: If it will benefit me economically, should I buy an internal HD for my laptop? Granted it must be of a higher memory capacity, I was thinking around 180~200gb, but I fear it will be difficult to install.

And what about the installed programs on my pc? How will I go about transferring those?

I would really appreciate any assistance and/or advice about my particular situation from those that feel they can be of some benefit to my woes. Thanks.

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Dilbert1234567

can you take your drive out and see if it's the 44 pin PATA or SATA ?

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MikeSty

I've been using an external drive for a year now, and I'd definitely say it is not high maintenance. In fact, it is very handy at LAN parties, taking gobs of documents to work, file recovery, backups, and so many things.

The answer to your question is this: Yes. However, it won't benefit you economically.

For a laptop, an external PATA drive would be cheaper than an internal drive of any type. The 2.5in laptop drives are generally more expensive, run at a slower RPM, and have much less space than an equivalent 3.5in desktop drive.

All you've got to do is grab a PATA drive ~250GB (not expensive) and a decent enclosure to pop it in. I bet you could do all that for around $100

I even did a little research:

Here's a generic 2.5in laptop drive:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148184

Not too shabby, better than I expected.

Now, here's an average 3.5in external drive
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148141

You get more GBs for damn near half the price.

Now all you've got to do is pick your enclosure (I sorted by rating, not price)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...d&Order=RATING

You can get one from between $20 and $40 I'd say.


Now, with all that said, leave your operating system on the internal 60GB drive, but start transferring documents over to the external drive. Basically, all the core components stay on the internal drive, and all your fun stuff (pictures/music/word documents/whatever) gets moved over to the new drive.

bendsley

I find it rather humorous that you would buy Seagate and not Maxtor, since they are the same company. Maxtor was purchased by Seagate the first part of 2006 I believe.

Anyway, I do enjoy my Seagate drives so.

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Glory's Sun

Externals really aren't high maintenance. In fact you can get decent prices on them.

TigerDirect has quite a few big drives for decent prices. 650Gb for $219 free shipping.

Jetée

Wow! Thank you very much MikeSty and guccilvr for helping HD woes. You better believe that I am making a personal "sticky" of this thread for how much it has helped my situation. Y'all are the best!

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—Mohandas K. Gandhi

MikeSty

You're very welcome I'm glad I finally found something on this forum I could help someone with. Usually I feel guilty for asking too many questions.

MikeSty

Check this thing out: http://www.buy.com/retail/product.as...id=&adid=17662

You basically can get that for free if you use Google Checkout and trust the M.I.R.