calling hard drive gurus need some help

[skylord23]

ok. im buying a new hard drive. im going to attempt using a SATA hard drive again. can someone tell me the difference b/w these 2 drives aside from their price and size. thanks 200 gb and this one 160 gb
i will be using this drive for video editing and data storage.

 

[edelbrock]

Ok, I have both drives currently. The difference between the two is that the 160 has NCQ. It is supposed add performance. A lot of review say that it doesn't in a desktop environment. Well it depends on what you do. For me it does because I multitask ALOT. I can tell a difference. Noise comparison between the two - The 160 is definately louder. If you don't multitask go with the 200GB.

 

[edelbrock]

Oh and if you are installing Win XP on the NCQ drive and making it the boot, you have to configure the controller as an AHCI device and install the drivers at the F6 prompt and then the Application Accelerator when XP is loaded to enable NCQ.

 

[WW2Planes1]

NCQ = Native Command Queueing
not every thing out there supports NCQ yet, so you might want to just go for the extra storage space.

 

[skylord23]

interesting. i do quite a bit of multitasking. i play games a LOT and i tend to do 5 things in the background while playing them. i do not plan to boot off this drive unless something happens to my primary drive. i tend to installl my files to this drive and use this as a storage drive.

 

[edelbrock]

Both drives are pretty fast. Note that I have the NCQ one as my operating system drive. I used to have the 200gb as my primary drive. If I am downloading something, transferring a file, have multiple apps running, and then open another app the NCQ drive is more responsive. Don't expect miracles but it is. Unless your apps are accessing the drive then you really don't need it. More storage would be better. If you think you might boot off of the drive at some point then get the NCQ one as long as your controller is NCQ enabled. Some people will have negative things to say about NCQ, but I can tell a difference in my environment. NCQ benefits are not there if the drive is just being used as storage and accessed infrequently.