Need Advice for new hard drive

I have a couple pc's that I am considering upgrading the hard drive
on. Both have motherboards that can handle the newer SATA hard
drives. As well, I am currently using ATA133 hard drives but on one
system I am getting an odd clicking problem from the hard drive at
times. I know it must be going bad and would rather replace it before
it does. On the other system the hard drive is fine but I have a
virus on the system that i have been unable to wipe out and am
planning on reformatting and installing everything fresh and I figured
that's the best time to replace a hard drive. The hard drives are
getting old on both systems and more or less I want to do it as
preventative maintenance.
My question, is it worth the little extra money of going for a SATA
instead of ATA133?
Are all SATA drives created equal? I see some listed as SATA 150.
Are these faster?
As well, I was planning on going with a 200 gig hard drive but I
noticed with Maxtor they have a 250 gig that is available with both a
8mb and a 16mb buffer so I thought maybe it's worth going to this. Is
the 16mb buffer going to make a big change in speed that it's worth
going for that over the 8mb or the 200 gig?
Are there any other brands I should look at? Overall I've been happy
with Maxtor and in the past was unhappy with Western Digital. I never
have tried Seagate. Thanks for any help.

I appreciate all the advice I have received. One thing I've been
concerned with is that there is potential the SATA drives could be
slower than the ATA/133 drives I have now. I don't know the model
number offhand except that they are maxtor drives. Maybe compared to
older ATA133 drives they wouldn't be slower.
The motherboards I have are both ASUS motherboards. One is the P4P800
Deluxe, the other is the A7N8X-E. I am looking at the specs. and
hoping it may give me some information so I can figure out how good
the SATA controller is on them. It does list the P4P800 Deluxe board
as having a Southbridge controller which I think is for both the SATA
and the ATA133. Actually it also says it supports RAID 0,1. It has a
VIA6410 RAID controller. For the A7N8X-E it doesn't say it's a
southbridge controller. it says it supports RAID 0, RAID 1. It has a
Silicon Image Sil 3112A RAID Controller.
Next, as for what I use my computer for, I do a lot of web browsing,
email, office work (Excel, Word) but as well am getting more into
graphic design and am doing some desktop video as well (Pinnacle
Studio 9).
Also, I likely would stay away from SCSI but am curious about RAID. I
probably have the wrong idea about it but from what I thought of RAID
it's simply two drives working together that if one fails it's hot
swappable and you can easily replace one and it'll replicate from the
other drive. Basically that it's two mirrored drives acting as backup
to each other.
From what I read though is it something that makes a drive act faster?
Do you need to buy a specific drive that supports RAID?
From what I see this motherboard supports it. The boards both say
they support RAID 0,1 for SATA. Is this a technology that will make
my hard drives faster?

On Sunday 28 Nov 2004 00:45, MarkW wrote:

> I appreciate all the advice I have received. One thing I've been
> concerned with is that there is potential the SATA drives could be
> slower than the ATA/133 drives I have now. I don't know the model
> number offhand except that they are maxtor drives. Maybe compared to
> older ATA133 drives they wouldn't be slower.
> The motherboards I have are both ASUS motherboards. One is the P4P800
> Deluxe, the other is the A7N8X-E. I am looking at the specs. and
> hoping it may give me some information so I can figure out how good
> the SATA controller is on them. It does list the P4P800 Deluxe board
> as having a Southbridge controller which I think is for both the SATA
> and the ATA133. Actually it also says it supports RAID 0,1. It has a
> VIA6410 RAID controller. For the A7N8X-E it doesn't say it's a
> southbridge controller. it says it supports RAID 0, RAID 1. It has a
> Silicon Image Sil 3112A RAID Controller.

I haven't read a lot of performance reviews lately but when I looked into it
about 18 months ago, it seemed that a step up in buffer size on the HD made
about the same difference as a step up in bus speed. I ended up going for
the A7N8X-D (which handles up to 4 ATA133, plus 2 SATA150) and a Seagate
SATA150 ('cos they're very quiet) but I haven't done any performance-heavy
stuff, really.


> [...]
> Also, I likely would stay away from SCSI but am curious about RAID. I
> probably have the wrong idea about it but from what I thought of RAID
> it's simply two drives working together that if one fails it's hot
> swappable and you can easily replace one and it'll replicate from the
> other drive. Basically that it's two mirrored drives acting as backup
> to each other.
> From what I read though is it something that makes a drive act faster?

A good summary is at <http://www.recoverdata.com/raidfaq.htm> (which I found
by googling for "raid faq"). Basically, RAID 0 makes your drives faster,
because it can write data to either drive, but if either drive fails, you
lose everything -- so it isn't really RAID. RAID 1 doesn't make your drive
faster, but if either one fails, you can replace it and all your data
should be fine. (In a desktop PC it's unlikely to be hot-swappable,
though, i.e., you'll have to turn the power off before you replace the
broken drive.)

RAID 5 combines the best of both, but needs at least 3 drives. If you want
RAID 5, you'll have to buy a separate RADI controller card (try
www.promise.com, www.highpoint-tech.com, www.3ware.com -- and google, of
course :-)

> Do you need to buy a specific drive that supports RAID?

No, but it makes sense to buy drives which are the same size (for RAID 1 and
above) because you'll only be able to use as much space on each drive as
the size of the smallest drive. I would probably buy several drives all
the same model.


> From what I see this motherboard supports it. The boards both say
> they support RAID 0,1 for SATA. Is this a technology that will make
> my hard drives faster?

RAID 0 = faster but unsafe; RAID 1 = safer but not faster.

Hope that helps,
Hugh.

--
Remove ".NO" and "SPAM." to reply.

I am definitely getting a SATA drive and am looking at ordering any
day but another thing I ran into, I saw online that when you order a
lot of places sell SATA power adaptors. I know I need to buy a data
cable but as well, will my power supply's regular cables (the ones I
use with my IDE drives) not work? Do I need an adaptor? I am going
with the Maxtor 250.