Upgrading Advice: More RAM or Bigger Faster HDD?

[Miklebud]

Okay I'm in a predicament. I've got around $100 to spend and my options are the following:

Bigger Faster Hard Drive - SATA?
. Reasons to upgrade: I've got an old 80GB Maxtor which only has about 5GB of freespace available.
Slow load times on games, etc.
Also, is it possible to upgrade to a SATA drive and transport all of the current data on my Maxtor onto my new drive? Or would it be wise to just use the Maxtor as a slave drive? And, would I be needing to install SATA Drivers for my mobo?

More Memory
Currenty: 512MB (2x256) of OCZ PC3500 Enhanced Latency DC memory
. Reasons to upgrade: It's only 512MB, I'm a Graphic Design Student a do quite a bit of work on Photoshop, Illustrator, Etc and rendering takes its time with my 2.4ghz opteron.
Also, the RAM is running at 171mhz 2.5-3-3-6, because I cant even seem to getting running at 200mhz (even though its stock speeds are 215). It may just be my mobo, because it ran 220's on my NF2 board.

I've got around $100 to spend. Now which to upgrade...? I was thinking, upgrade my RAM to a gigabyte and sell off my old OCZ to buy more HDD space, but I dont know how much I could get for some old OCZPC3500 memory.

What would you do, given my circumstances?

 

[imported_killuminati]

for Harddisk get SATA2 ( 300mbps ) ones , they are backward compatiable to SATA1 ( 150 mbps )

about ram , i dunno .

Peace & ciao !!!

 

[BoboKatt]

Hey there...

You know... years ago I would simply have said... more RAM more RAM. Ram had always a way of really speeding things up, especially since we all had so little of it back then due to high costs. Now RAM costs nothing...on XP everyone says 1 GIG if the sweet spot and over that unless you are doing crazy stuff you wont really notice anything. Personally I did notice a decent boost going from 512 to 1 Gig as you are thinking of doing... HOWEVER from your description of things I can GUARANTEE you will have your eyes POP out of your head if you do install a brand new SATA 200+ gig drive. I now have 4 of these newer drives... two 200 and two 250. One of the 200 and 250 have the 16 MEG cache. When I upgraded my father's comp all I did was take out his older 80 and 30 GIG drive and installed the 250 SATA 16 MEG cache. I did a full XP install... and to this day he thinks I somehow gave him a 4Ghz overclocked mad screaming machine. All I did was upgrade his drive. The technology used it today's drives is insane.. especially the platter density.

As for what to do after you install the drive.. first of all please install fresh onto it.. don?t do a crap swap of drive image of the older drive. Also keep the older drive to maybe copy crap over like all your documents. If you would have had these 2 drives both on the same IDE channel I would have said to drop the older one.. it just slows things down. However as one will be SATA and the older one is IDE or even if it was SATA.. who cares as SATA drives don?t share channels.

Depending on what version of XP you are installing you might need to have SATA drivers installed first. If you have the Xp sp2... then I believe it just works... right from boot up. I never installed ANY SATA drivers... and I installed Winxp and never bothered with anything else. I believe the Nvidia Nforce or Via4inone drivers have SATA stuff within them so again I did not need to install anything.

good luck

BTW after this 512 more RAM will for sure help some games just crawl unless you have 1 GIG or more.

 

[bigpow]

RAM

 

[firewall]

BoboKatt, which HD is the 16meg one? Links?

 

[Miklebud]

Well then! Thanks for the suggestions BoboKatt! Any preference on a sub-$100 120GB+ SATA hard drive?

Also, anyone have an estimate on how much I could get for my 2x256 PC3500 RAM? That could also add into this equation.

EDIT- How does the Barracuda 7200.9 series work? It's no 16mb Cache, but it's SATA and affordable. (160GB model)

 

[Miklebud]

Okay, make that $96.78 to upgrade. Any more suggestions.

Also, what is the value of OCZ PC3500!?