What Hard Drive? Ide/Serial/Raid/Purplemonkeydishwasher?

Mutz

Hi,

My hard drive went bang so now i need a new one. The old one was a Western Digital Cavier 80gig 8mb cache with 7200rpm, 3.5" ide.

My question is - I want to get a new one with around 100 - 200 gig space but what type of hard drives are the best?

Should I try something new like RAID, or stick with the IDE, or am I completely talking nonsense?

Also, with a hard disk of this size, what is the best partition size for max performance? (E.g. Drice C: 10 gb - Drive 40gb etc).

Cheers

Random

Don't paritition your hard drive, in my opinion it's a waste of time.

As for the size hard drive, go for a 200GB if you can afford it.
Komplett have it for E96 and Maplin do them for E125 at the moment.

As for connection type? There's no real advantage to SATA at the moment, so it's not really worth the E15 extra you pay, in my opinion.

So you're looking for: ATA133, 8MB cache (at minimum), 7200RPM

Ciaran500

For raid you will need 2 of the same HDD and a raid controller. Not worth it TBH.

I would advise you partition a HDD over 120Gb. It keeps everything seperate and makes it much easier defragment your HDD and keep it clean from junk. You need about 10Gb-15Gb for your windows partition, the rest are up to you depending on how much music/games/progrmas you have.

duridian

Before you decide what hard drive to buy, you should first find out what type of hard drive your pc can use (ie. IDE is the traditional interface with years, only more recent pcs have the ability to use SATA drives) Also it is very important to find out if your motherboard can work with hard drives larger than 137MB (also called 48bit LBA support). No point in buying a 200gig hard drive only to plug it in and find that the pc won't recognise it as a 200gig.

Mutz

Thanks for thr Help!

THIS is my motherboard. It supports SATA but i'm not sure about the 48bit LBA support thing.

So will i bother with SATA?

Also I think I might upgrade the Motherboard and ram while I'm at it so any recommendations would be appreciated! (Processor = p4 2,4ghz Northwood)

RicardoSmith

I'd get which ever is cheapest.

duridian

I'd go SATA if I was you, better performance than IDE, so if you got it why not use it? They're only slightly dearer than an equivalent size IDE drive plus you needn't worry about the 48bit LBA issue. That board you've got supports RAID so if you wanted to go about it you could get 2 smaller drives and RAID 0 them together so they appear to Windows as one larger drive but double the speed.
Your present board's not bad, the only real limitations I see on this are 1. the board doesn't support 800FSB cpus so if you wanted to upgrade the cpu you'd have to use a 533FSB CPU which are becoming rarer. 2. the SiS chipset would not be as good for overclocking as an 865/875 Intel chipset. Neither of these are major issues if you are happy with your present cpu. Ram, well the board only supports up to DDR333(PC2700) so if you're keeping this board, that's what you need, I don't think it does dual channel either so a dual channel kit would be a waste of money. If you do change mobo, maybe something like an Asus P4P800 would suit.

MrPinK

I'd definitely recommend going for at least two partitions, and seperating your files from the OS files. Windows becomes sluggish over time and it's nice to go back to that virginal feel of a fresh installation from time to time. Or it can just break for no good reason. If you keep all your stuff on a seperate partition you can reinstall at a moment's notice without having to back up anything. I have 6gig partitions for XP Pro and XP x64, but I could have probably have gotten away with smaller. Nothing other that the XP installed files and the likes of system restore info is stored on these partitions. All the folders such "My Documents" and "Program Files" I mapped to the other partition with Tweak XP. You can subdivide the big partition into games, music, etc. but predicting how much space to give each is pretty hard. I think virtual drives are a better option.

JackKelly

just scanned through what has been said, but this might be of some help. You wont get a better price

Slutmonkey57b

duridian wrote:

I'd go SATA if I was you, better performance than IDE, so if you got it why not use it? They're only slightly dearer than an equivalent size IDE drive plus you needn't worry about the 48bit LBA issue. That board you've got supports RAID so if you wanted to go about it you could get 2 smaller drives and RAID 0 them together so they appear to Windows as one larger drive but double the speed.

Myth 1: SATA offers higher performance. The SATA drives you can buy now are the EXACT SAME DRIVES as PATA ones, just with a SATA interface bolted on. None of the current mobo's or drives on the market actually support the SCSI-like features of SATA, and won't until SATA II is out.

Myth 2: RAID gies you higher performance. Desktop users will see little or no benefit to RAID solutions. Server environments see the benefits, desktop applications simply have no use for it. Mirroring means you have "redundancy" in case one of your drives burns up, but really, you're better off with a DVD writer and a regular system backup.
See www.storagereview.com for more info.

The "benefits" you WILL get from SATA at the moment are: smaller cables (nice to work with), no "master/slave" conflicts and the lovely experience of having to install SATA drivers from a floppy before you can install an OS on it. Hard disks can't flood the udma 100/133 bus yet, never mind the SATA 150 bus.

Since you can't get a SATA optical drive yet either I'd stick with PATA. By the time SATA II drives and mobo's come out you'll probably be looking to upgrade your system anyway.

RicardoSmith

Couldn't agree more. Though I think there is a optical drive on the market now. Thats only a matter time.

Gilgamesh

would go with the Purplemonkeydishwasher, supposed to be the bomb when it comes to performance LOL