Hard Drive Questions [Archive]

sweave

2 Feb 2007, 5:31pm

hi :)

planning on building a new system in a few months and im having a bit of confusion on HDs

now i know that eide is the old format and that sata (Serial ata) is the new(ish) but what is PATA and ultra-ATA?

also i'm first planning on getting a general sata HD when i build it and later add a second faster HD for games and other things i want faster loads on.

so my second question is what would be better for me for the second HD: raid or scsi (i was originally thinking of a 70gbish raid hd for this purpose)

thanks

Pterocarpous

2 Feb 2007, 7:29pm

...planning on building a new system in a few months and im having a bit of confusion on HDs...now i know that eide is the old format and that sata (Serial ata) is the new(ish) but what is PATA and ultra-ATA?...also i'm first planning on getting a general sata HD when i build it and later add a second faster HD for games and other things i want faster loads on...so my second question is what would be better for me for the second HD: raid or scsi (i was originally thinking of a 70gbish raid hd for this purpose)...

Whatis.com (http://whatis.techtarget.com/) and Webopedia (http://www.webopedia.com/) are two terrific resources for answering the types of questions you have. You can go HERE (http://whatis.techtarget.com/wsearchResults/1,290214,sid9,00.html) for info. re: PATA & SATA and HERE (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/U/Ultra_ATA.html) for info. re: ultra ATA (which is one of the types of PATA). You can also find information re: EIDE HERE (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/E/EIDE.html).

There are now two SATA standards out; SATA 1 (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/Serial_ATA.html) (referred to as just SATA) and SATA II (2) (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/S/SATA_2.html). The newest, SATA II, is twice as fast (3Gb/s data transfer rate) as the original SATA (1.5Gb/s data transfer rate) standard. SATA II was originally developed for server environments. For best performance, I recommend you get SATA or SATA II drives and a motherboard that has SATA II-capable controllers built in.

For more info. on SATA in general, checkout SATA-IO.org (http://www.sata-io.org/)

HERE (http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp) is a link to a site that compares and contrasts the two standards, PATA & SATA well.