Topic awaiting preservation: Hard Drives (Page 1 of 1)

If I wanted to get another hard drive for file storage purposes, what *kind* would I need to put in my PC (beneath my two disk drives), ATA or IDE?

IDE or paralle ATA (PATA) has wide cables that you can usual hold 2 drives (A master and slave.).

Serial ATA (SATA) has thin cabes that only connect to one drive.

Just find the what your computer can support and get one of those. Theres not a great deal of speed difference between the SATA and PATA hough the fastest drives are on SATA (The Western digital Raptor).

Parallel ATA on the left, Serial ATA on the right.
http://www.maadiran.com/persian/IMAGES/sata-pata.jpg

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Thanks, I was worried that I'd order the wrong one and when it got here it would end up being useless =\.

there's still great resource bottlenecks in a motherboard's various bus-lines, like the PCI bus-line that all PCI slots run through, maknig thme compete for processing resources. With the advent of such technologies as PCI-Express I think that thinks will greatly improve and SATA will prove to be a much better transmission type than PATA. If your motherboard supports SATA then I'd suggest getting SATA drives. Pata will be gone. Welcome to the world of deprecation.


Justice 4 Pat Richard

As a bit of reassurance, pretty much every pc can take 4 ide devices, cd rom + 3 hds or similar. Look up the master/slave and secondary/primary stuffs. To make it easier , set all the jumpers to Cable Select (CS) and put you OS hd on the end of the primary cable.

Meh, this just looks like such a good deal but it appears to be PATA...

Theres nothing bad about regular ATA, if it was SATA it wouldnt be any faster afaik.