Topic: Serial ATA / IDE Hard drives?

[Simon]

Can someone explain to me the difference between IDE and Serial ATA hard drives?  I am looking at getting a second HDD for storage, and not sure which format to go for, as the drives seem the same, but at different prices.  I will also need a PCI controller as I have no IDE connections left.

Also, does anyone know if the Hitachi Deskstar drives are still as good as they were when they were IBM?

Cheers, and Happy New Year!  

[Sandra]

IDE and SATA are entirely different interfaces Simon.
They are physically the same size but connect to the mobo via a smaller connector than the normal IDE ribbon.
They run at faster rpm than IDE does and because of the different interface they can have a longer connecting cable than was possible on the older IDE cable.
Unless your mobo has support for SATA then you cant use one, I am not sure if the PCI cards support SATA, if they do I havent come across one yet.
I am not sure if any drives are better than others at the moment but I tend to go with Seagate or Western Digital lately and havent had any problems with them  

[Simon]

Right, thanks Sandra.  

At the moment, it's a toss up between a Hitachi Deskstar 160Gb, ATA 100, which has a seek time of 8.5ms, and a 3 year warranty, or a Maxtor 160Gb, which has a 9.5ms seek time, only a one year warranty, but is ATA 133.

The IDE controller card is for ATA 133, but I don't think it matters if you use an ATA 100 drive, does it?  Is there really that much difference between ATA 100 and ATA 133?  I'm more drawn to the Deskstar, because of the 3 year warranty, and faster seek time, which I assume means it will access stuff quicker...?

A friend has a WD, and it keeps messing about, so I'm not so keen on them, and I have had one Maxtor which was DOA.  The IBM I have in my PC has been going strong for 2 years, with no problems.  If the Hitachi I am looking at was ATA 133, I would go for it straight away.

[Sandra]

I dont think theres much difference between the 100 and 133 ones but theres a big difference in performance between a drive with 8mb cache and one with 2mb  

[Simon]

Right, the Hitachi it is then.  Just going to read some more reviews, as one said it was very noisy.