SATA vs IDE Hard Drives

[tallman45]

Get a WD SE16 320gb SATA drive $139.99 no rebates free S/H from ZZF or CV with OEM 3yr warranty

Many benefits
1) Low power consumption, less heat, quiet new design
2) High density platters
3) 16mb cache
4) NCQ
5) 3.0Gb/s potential throughput (although highly unlikely)

Put you OS on an outer enge partition and you will be shocked at how fast things load

Lower cost alternative is the Seagate 160gb SATA 7200.9 with NCQ 8mb cache and a single 160gb platter. Very fast, quiet and draws very little power

 

[Ike0069]

I realize this is an old thread, but FWIW, I wish I has paid a few extra $$ for a SATA drive instead of the 200GB IDE drive I bought a year ago.

The reason, because running a SATA cable is much easier and less obtrusive than an IDE cable. For me, that and that alone is worth the extra money.

 

[nordicfireman]

how do i find out if my mobo supports sata or not?

 

[Bobthelost]

Does it have wierd little red slots less than an inch long on it?

Alternativly what motherboard do you have?

 

[nordicfireman]

i don't see any little red slots...my motherboard is a couple years old, it's an asus p4sd-vx. my hard drive is a barracuda 7200.7 120g ultra ata. (i guess it's "split" somehow into c and d, cause i do have those 2 drives when i browse my computer...i always assumed i had 2 physical drives.) so anyway, the big grey data cable from the drive goes down into one of 3 black, ~3 inch slots. the other two slots are taken up by 1. the combined cd and dvd drives and 2. the floppy drive.

 

[Bobthelost]

I don't think you have SATA with that motherboard. Correction you DO NOT, just found a piccie.

The drive has been "partitioned" into two parts, it's fairly common practice but i rarely bother myself. The big grey cable is an IDE (also refered to as PATA) cable. If you want to connect a SATA drive then you would need a PCI adapter card, and i wouldn't bother if i were you.

 

[nordicfireman]

damn, it got partitioned so that c is 15 gigs and d is 90, of course every program wants to install itself on c...i guess i'll try to sort everything out when i get another drive.

so i can/should just get an ide/pata drive? i see that there's another ide cable as well as another power connecter already in place for hooking up a second one.

thanks a lot for your help, i couldn't figure this out on my own cause i'm a n00b

 

[Bobthelost]

Don't worry, we were all n00bs at one point

You could get another drive, OR you could rearange your HD space so that the C bit is larger if you have more room in the D bit?

 

[nordicfireman]

well, i would love to make c larger, but right now d is just about full. i could get about 20 gigs freed up if i could figure out a good way to sort out my music problem:

i had about 20g of mp3s that decided to duplicate themselves 1 or 2 times, and i just found out about it so now my 30g of music is taking up 50g. i use itunes, and it seems it's reading some of the originals and some of the copies, so i can't do a search in that folder for any filename ending in 01 or 02 and delete the results. if i had lots of free space, i could select everything from my library and drag it into a new folder, so it would only copy one mp3 for each song, and then i could make that my new library, but that would mean i would lose my "stuff i like" playlist, which is 1000+ songs and not something i want to remake. aaanndd as far as i know itunes doesn't support those playlist files, i think they're called m3u's. so i'm not really sure what to do about that.

ugghh. but even if i could free up some space, i'm upgrading my graphics card and ram, and i plan to get some games going, so that will need some space, and i'd like to have more headroom than 20g. and i would like to keep more movies and pics on my comp too. so i think the best plan would be to get another drive. i guess i'd want to make the new drive the default for programs, is that possible?

 

[Bobthelost]

you can use the "show duplicate song" fuction in itunes that should help you find multiple songs.

Yes you can make the new drive the default install disc, the easiest way is to use something like ghost or a HD maker's cloning program so that the C drive is copied and pasted to the new drive. You would be better off reinstalling windows on the drive (I assume you use XP?) but it's more hastle in the end.

 

[nordicfireman]

well the problem with the itunes thing is that there's only one of each song in the library, but there's multiples of the actual mp3s, and i have waaayyy too many songs to do it song by song.

yes, i use xp. what are the benefits to reinstalling windows on a new drive? and what effect does that have on programs, settings, or whatever?

 

[Bobthelost]

If you reinstall XP you clear out all the junk that you no longer need that cloggs up and slows down the hard drive. But you have to reinstall everything and reconfigure it all. Which is a bitch.

If you were to stick up the itunes question in another thread and keep bumping it till you get an answer you'll get better help on that one i think.

 

[nordicfireman]

ok, sounds good. thanks again for the help. i'll try to get that itunes thing worked out. adios!