New hard drive... SATA ATA?

Nel. wrote on 5/15/2005, 4:32 PM

I am looking for a bigger hard drive.... and get all confused by the terminology....
SATA = serial ata interface and ATA = parallel....
What is the difference... is the difference "important"... as to say I won't be able to use a SATA if my original drive is ATA 100?
I have a Sony VAIO PCV-RX 550. about 4 years old, Pentium 4 1.5GHz 512 RAM
The C hard drive is 60GB ATA 100 which is split C/D
and W drive (80GB) IBM deskstar, which i use only for editing... no programs on it....
This one I want to change to a bigger one....200-300 GB
I am looking at Seagate Barracuda 7200.8 250GB HD, Serial ATA-150 7200 RPM 8MB or
Deskstar T7K250 250GB hard drive (Serial ATA II, 7200 RPM, 8MB)
or
Maxtor Diamond Max Plus 10 300GB hard drive (EIDE, Ultra ATA/133 7200 RPM, 16MB)
Which one would work best.....
Barracuda is given a good rating.... but would it work for me?
I will in the boom docks and rely on forums and internet to get infos.....
Help much appreciated.....
Thanks

Comments

Chienworks wrote on 5/15/2005, 5:46 PM

SATA uses a different connector than IDE. If your computer is 4 years old you probably don't have SATA connectors on the motherboard so you will probably also have to buy an SATA interface card. Some motherboard BIOSes don't support using both IDE and SATA interfaces simultaneously. I don't know how this would apply to an added card though.

The increase in performance in your particular system would probably be small at best. If it were me, i would stick with IDE until you get a more modern computer. To give you an idea of what ATA/133 is capable of, in my old 866MHz system i could copy 40 GB from one drive to another in probably 10 minutes or less. This represents about 3 hours of DV. You probably won't notice the difference that faster drives would make.

I always highly recommend Western Digital. After 20 years and probably a couple hundred drives now, i've only seen a couple of WD failures, and those in drives over 10 years old. We have a few 15 year old WD drives still spinning 24/7. On the other hand, i've seen lots (not all, but a significan number) of Maxtors and Seagates fail in a couple of years or less, and even a few come in DOA right from the factory.

Nel. wrote on 5/16/2005, 9:57 AM

Thanks for your info..... I'll search for western Digital