Which Hard Drive

[Rebel50]

I need a new/bigger hard drive for my Athlon 2500/8RDA+ system, I was thinking of getting an 80 gig Maxtor with the ATA133 interface - anyone have any thoughts good or bad on these HDD's.

Or are there other brands that also have the ATA133 interface that can be recommended.

I seem to remember some issues with Western Digital drives and the 8RDA motherboards - have these been addressed by bios updates?

I am currently using (a very full) Seagate 20 gig 5400 rpm drive, are the newer Barracuda IV drives much faster?

Thanks for any advice

 

[jacktesterson]

the ATA133 is just a number to use as a selling point

won't see a difference over a ATA 100 drive, that being said, I recommend the 80GB Maxtor

 

[thorin]

Dunno about the compatability issues yer talkin about but I'd definately recommend a WD Special Edition.

Thorin

 

[Sheriff]

Originally posted by: thorin
Dunno about the compatability issues yer talkin about but I'd definately recommend a WD Special Edition.

Thorin

Ditto

 

[Nebor]

I have 2 WD Special Edition 80GB in my main machine in Raid 0, and bought one to run in my AMD machine too!

THey are good little drives. And they don't get hot either!

 

[Rebel50]

Thanks for the quick answers on a new HDD, I managed to find that article on the WD drive issues when used on 8RDA mobo's, it was posted under the issues section for the 8RDA's on the "motherboardfaqs" website - as follows:

Hard drive not detected - (Western Digital especially)

The first thing you should do to try and fix this problem is set the drive's jumpers to "cable select". If this doesn't work, you might have to perform a bit of magic with some scissors. Grab the IDE cable that you use for your hard drive, and cut the wire going to pin1 (which is the red wire on most older cables.) If you have a newer 80 wire cable, you will have to find both of the wires going to pin 1 and cut them. They are almost always the first two on the ribbon. I will add pictures if someone who has done this can send them in

Cutting wires sounds a bit drastic - any of you WD users had this problem?

 

[Mavrick007]

I have 2 WD 1200JB drives on my 8rda3+ board and they were picked up by the board and installed with the OS (WinXP) fine
but when I would boot up again with the win cd out, it would give a "disk boot error". I finally traced it to the jumper on the hd.
I put it to "cable select" instead of master for the primary boot drive or slave for the primary slave, and it fixed it.
I didn't read about any of this until after I got it working by trial and error.