Need advice on a fast hard drive!

[Grant_H]

I'm looking to upgrade my small 30GB HD, it has many bad sectors and has seen alot of formats, defrags, re-wrights, deleated files, etc. Norton disk doctor can't fix all of the errors this HD has, so I think it's time for a new one.

I've been searching the net for a good fast HD. I found a few for under $100 bucks but there SATA, and I'm not sure if an SATA will work with my standerd EIDE MB?

Can anyone clearify if an SATA will work? If not can anyone suggest a fast HD that work with a stanerd EIDE socket. I'm looking for something with a data transfer rate of 150 MB/sec or greater and a 8MB buffer.

Or am I looking at the wrong specs, that determine the speed of a HD.

just a little more info: I'm mostly using it for ripping DVD's and re-encoding.

TIA

[Faustus]

SATA is a different bus then standard IDE, so unless you buy a controller it will not work. Just get a good Western Digital with 8mb cache. You should be fine. If you need faster get 2 of them and an IDE raid controller. Or 2 SATAs and a SATA raid controller.

[The village idiot]

SATA will not work with IDE controllers.You would have to put a SATA controller in your machine, some drives come with a "free" controller. Otherwise, CompUSA, BestBuy, Staples all had "normal" IDE drives on sale. Most of them were ATA133 drives ranging from 200GB to 30GB From either Maxtor or Western Digital. Staples has what might be the best deal of a 160 GB ATA133 drive for $99 after rebates. If you don't have an ATA133 controller, the drive will just run slower, no big deal.

edit: beat again because of my slow typing skills

[Grant_H]

bumer, those SATA drivers are cheap and seem to be a fast HD.

I'm not very fimilular with raid drives, how much is involved in setting up a raid controller and about how much $$ and I looking at for this.

Basically I'm just looking for the fastest drive at the lowest price (around $100 or so).

My MB is a Gigabyte technology, GA-8IRX if this helps.

[The village idiot]

If you want to set up raid, then you might want to get the SATA drives, 2 of them would be good. Then buy an SATA raid controller. You can do nearly the same with a normal controller (non-raid) in either SATA or regular ATA. It is called a stripe set, and windows NT, 2000, and XP can make them without any additional software.

I don't know anything about SATA drives yet, but for regular drives it is pretty easy:

- Get an ide controller, and 2 or more drives that are ideally the same size and speed (7200 rpm or faster and ATA133).
- Install the hardware, and the drivers for the controller
- go to disk manager and see that the 2 new drives are shown
- on the left hand side of the drive window in disk manager you will see the drive listed with the word basic, right click in that box and choose to change the drive to dynamic. Do the same for the other drive.

This next part I don't remember exactly so hopefully someone else can fill in the blanks:

Now you have to create a partition on the 2 new disks, you want to select both drives and partition them both as a stripe set. I think you select one drive, then hold the control key and select the other, then right click to partition and choose stripe set. Those 2 drives now show as a different color and are labled as a stripe set.
Then format as NTFS.

If you need help, you can also use the windows help system, it does a good job getting you through the steps. The hardware part is where there is no windows help. The SATA drives can be used as external drives if you want to put them into an external enclosure. There are some examples here:
http://shop.ily.com/c_28.htm

[Grant_H]

I'm still trying to decied if I want to go with a SATA RAID configuration or just install a new ATA drive, I actually found a 120GB ATA/133 8MB buffer for about $30, can't hardly go wrong there?

The thing is I would like to learn a little more about the RAID configuration, like the advantages and disadvantages, how much faster is it than standered drive setup, etc, etc. Can anyone point me in the right direction on a FAQ quide or something that talks about a RAID setup.

TIA

Grant

[stiltman]

I actually found a 120GB ATA/133 8MB buffer for about $30, can't hardly go wrong there?

Post the link please.

By far the least expensive HDD, I've ever heard of

[BJ_M]

i would not really recomend a raid 0 config for your boot drive ..

and will you really need a raid config ? prob. not

[Grant_H]

I actually found a 120GB ATA/133 8MB buffer for about $30, can't hardly go wrong there?

Post the link please.

By far the least expensive HDD, I've ever heard of

http://reviews.cnet.com/Maxtor_DiamondMax_Plus_9___hard_drive___120_GB___ATA_133/4505-...?tag=pdtl-list

[BJ_M]

when you click on BUY for the one time its listed at 29$ ..

you get this:

2140022 JAMES BOND 007: NIGHTFIRE FOR GAMECUBE (#14593) Detail Specs $29.99 YES

[Grant_H]

when you click on BUY for the one time its listed at 29$ ..

you get this:

2140022 JAMES BOND 007: NIGHTFIRE FOR GAMECUBE (#14593) Detail Specs $29.99 YES

yes I just noticed that and was going to edit my post,

damn you replyed to that really fast!!

[stiltman]

when you click on BUY for the one time its listed at 29$ ..

you get this:

2140022 JAMES BOND 007: NIGHTFIRE FOR GAMECUBE (#14593) Detail Specs $29.99 YES

Best price I found
http://216.136.224.156/hoct12/max120gb72ud.html

[BJ_M]

http://store.yahoo.com/justdeals/gswl120gb5400.html

http://www.pcrapids.com/home.asp?pw=y&pwl=search/productdesc.asp?lsskuid=HarIBM100t02072

http://3btech.net/whlawedimdat3.html

[gmatov]

Grant,

I may be old fashioned andd conservative, but I think you would be best served to stick with ATA133, non raid.

There are afew guys here who proselytize RAID, but they only tell you the good, never that if one drive goes, in a striped array, you lost everything.

Nor that this game doesn't require those supposedly superfast write speeds.

I calculated the per second write for DV some time ago, at 13 gig per hour, and there is not a drive sold today that will not write it.

SATA is not there yet, and even at a supposed 150 MBs, is not any faster than ATA 133, because of the limitations of the board's bus s.

Ah well, buy what you will.

George

[Ransterp]

RAID stands for Redundant Arrays of Inexpensive Disks.
It has quite a few level 0-5
level 0 - mirroring i.e. if you have 2 drives then what you have on drive 1 is duplicated in drive 2. The benefit is if drive 1 goes down then you still have everything in drive 2. Also it is faster because the RAID controller can service requests with lets say half from drive 1 and the other half from drive 2. The draw back is that you will need 2 drives to do the work of one.

Higher levels of RAID 1-5 involve striping ( spread data out over all the drive in the RAID ) and parity ( ECCs,Checksums ) so that data can be regenerated in case of of the drive fail.

Most people use RAID in environments that require fault-tolerance (banking etc. ) and not as much for speed.

Unless you are an expert, most people are better off with single drive environment.

[elmotheteapot]

Ransterp haslisted the speed and failure advantage of RAID, as far as speed wise goes, short of going for SCSI drives, a Raid 0 array would serve you well. You could go with two standard IDE 7200RPM Drives (for thsi i recommend the 3yr warrenty Western Digitals with excellent build quality or Seagate B'cuda's, cheap and also well built) Both of my suggestions are 7200RPM 8mb cache. Or you could go for SATA with which the Segates Barracudas and Maxtor Diamonds are very good, or a step above in SATA is the Western Digital RAPTOR drives @ 10000rpm (which come in 36.7GB and 70GB, and claim to match SCSI specs) they come with a 5yr warrenty, cost more but compared to the other SATA drives around they are in a class of their own with blazing speeds (even more so in RAID)

Just choose the size you need, all the IDe drives come in the new series go from 20Gb to around 160Gb (in 20gb incrmenets usually) or higher depending on the maker. SATA usually come in 80Gb, 120b and 160Gb or higher depending on maker once again.

Hope this helps!

[Grant_H]

Thanks guy's for all of your info, I think I will stay away from RAID, sounds like it might be more than what i want to deal with.

I was thinking about going with an SATA and getting an SATA controller, but as gmatov stated there realling isn't any speed increase over ATA because of MB limitations. I'll look into it further, and again thanks for all of your info.