What hard disk should I buy? Old system

[Kaustav]

OK people, some general advice needed. I have a five year old P2 450MHz PC which I believe comes with an ATA 33 IDE controller on an Intel motherboard. I have a 10 and a 4 Gb Hard disk on it right now. I need to reinstall everything soon anyway as it's a bit of a mess so I am thinking of buying a larger hard disk. I'm going to buy a rocket raid IDE PCI card. My questions are:

1. considering the speed of my motherboard (probably 100MHz as I use 100Mhz RAM) which speed Rocket RAID card should I get?
2. Will my system not be able to handle ATA 100 Rocket RAID card? Should I just totally forget about ATA133 card as my system is so old?
3. Is it worth buying a 7200 RPM HD or should I just get a 5400 RPM disk as the faster disk will just be wasted due to the slow underlying hardware on my old PC?

I was thinking of getting the Rocket RAID ATA100 card with onboard BIOS and a 40Gb Maxtor ATA100 hard disk.

Kaustav

 

[rb56]

I personally would say forget about the RAID card (save the money for mb cpu upgrage). The difference in the price of a 7200rpm and 5400rpm is not that much, so go for a 7200rpm and use it when you upgrade.

rb56

 

[Jeff H]

Kaustav, first off really consider getting a 7200RPM drive. You will notice a difference, irrespective of your ATA33, between a 5400 and 7200RPM drive. Second, I've seen a number of boards of your vintage that don't play nice w/ hard drives over 30GB. You can find a lot of 30GB drives via PriceWatch. I'd forget the RAID. If you do want to go ATA100 or ATA133 consider a Promise controller. You can pick an OEM 133 card up from Newegg.com for $36. FWIW I have a new Promise ATA133 card that I bought before I made a decision on my mainboard (which has an onbard HiPoint ATA133 controller). If you're interested PM me, I'll let it go for considerably less than the $36, plus I'll pick up the freight.

 

[Kaustav]

Good point about the 30Gb limit, which I was aware of. The IDE conrtroller card I was going to pruchase was going to have it's own onboard BIOS which I believe gets around the storage limitation of my onboard IDE conroller.

 

[Jeff H]

Kaustav, there are HiPoint cards w/ onboad BIOS, as are there Promise cards that accomplish what you need. Good luck w/ your decision.