After 2 months with broadband I’ve managed to almost completely fill my 1,5 year old 80 GB drive, and I need more storage space ASAP. I’ve been looking at 120 and 160 GB drives, giving me plenty of space and also being pretty affordable. It will also make it possible for me to perform a long overdue formatting and Win reinstall once I’ve got a parallell drive to backup files to.
What should I look for (and watch out for) if I want to buy a new hard drive? Noise is an issue, and I want the new drive to be as silent as possible, as long as it is affordable.
I replaced a Maxtor 40GB drive with Seagate 120GB recently – damn, the seagate was quieter, and this was only a “semi-quiet” drive, according to silentpcreview.com.
It’s a newer standard for hard drive connections, and will supplant IDE over the next few years.
It’s serial, in that you can only have one device per SATA channel. It currently tops out at 150 Mbps, which most drives today barely touch in burst, but it’s at least got headroom for growth.
If your mainboard has on-board SATA support, you might consider buying a SATA drive, so you can keep your current hard drive as a sort of redundant repository of data in case something goes awry. 80 gigs will back up an awful lot of data, and it’s a lot faster than burning CDs of everything.
I’m currently running a 40 gig WD and an 80 gig WD, both using Abit Serielle adapters so I can hook them up to SATA. I look forward to the day I can replaced the 40 gig with a 36 gig Raptor, and replace the 80 gig with a larger SATA drive.
If you are using older hardware, make sure your machine can support a drive of the size you want. Your BIOS might not recognize a drive larger than 137GB.
Does onboard Serial ATA really get much of a speed boost if the plugs still have to go through the PCI stuff? I think only certain Intel boards have a dedicated serial ATA plug (I really don’t know the terminology). I have a 10,000 rpm WD serial ATA hard drive, but the motherboard’s plug shares bandwidth with the PCI slots. Is there really an advantage to SATA here?
Are you saying in comparison to IDE? Very tiny. I recall seeing benchmarks of the same two drives, one IDE, one SATA, on a computer with a PCI SATA card.
Despite the restriction of PCI on SATA’s abilities, the SATA drive did show a slight improvement in the benches.
That’s good to know… so if I had a motherboard that had serial ports that didn’t share anything (like the 865 and 875 chipsets, one thing I wish an AMD chipset would do), there would be a more dramatic improvement in performance. Oh well, maybe someday.
Current hard drives aren’t fast enough to saturate the PCI bus, unless you’re talking about a striped set it’s not that big of an issue. Still, moving stuff off the PCI bus is good, it can get crowded between 3D audio, your nic, hard drive traffic, etc.
Then take comfort in the fact that all hard disk drives eventually fail, and that he’s going to lose the data on both drives when one of them succumbs to the MTBF spectre.
Then take comfort in the fact that all hard disk drives eventually fail, and that he’s going to lose the data on both drives when one of them succumbs to the MTBF spectre.[/quote]
I don’t wish the click of death upon even my most loathed nemesis’. That’s a level of hatred I’m unwilling to succumb to. ;)
Then take comfort in the fact that all hard disk drives eventually fail, and that he’s going to lose the data on both drives when one of them succumbs to the MTBF spectre.[/quote]
:? :? :? Funnily enough, my original option (160g sata maxtor) died within a week :x :x :x , so I RMA’d it for a refund and got the raptors… They have a 5 year warranty, plus I keep my important data on a separate machine
