Viewing Thread:
"HDD"

I'm desperately needing a new HDD, and have had my eye on one for some time now. So, I went to order it and...

[URL]http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?action=aW5hY3RpdmVfcHJvZHVjdA%3D%3D&product_uid=43707[/URL]

...that sucks.

So I was wondering if any of you could recommend me a particular drive.
Maxtor would be nice, but I'm really not bothered as long as it's 120GB+ (the above was 200) and is reliable and quiet and the likes.
Cheers people.

You need a RAID controller. Assuming you have one on board, you go into the BIOS, or the RAID setup (sometimes RAID setup is in BIOS, sometimes it immediately follows the POST, but before Windows loads) and then set it up by making some settings.

It's quite techy, and not worth it. You also double your chance of data loss when you stripe two hard drives to work as one big drive. I don't need the redunancy of a mirroring array. That's what DVD-RW back ups are for.

Aaaah.... Thanks.

How would you set up a RAID array?

IDE, or less commonly Parallel ATA, is the same sort of connector as you have on you CD-ROM drive. In the UDMA-133 implentation it has a theoretical maximum data transfer rate per channel of 133 MB/s.

Serial ATA is a new style connector, using serial data transfer, as opposed parallel data transfer. Wow, so non-obvious. It has a maximum data transfer rate of 150 MB/s, or in the new SATA specification, 300 MB/s per channel. No single drive can touch this sort of speed. I was lucky to manage 60 MB/s.

What drive do you have? I've not come across one that supports IDE and SATA, although you can get converters to allow you to run IDE hard drives on a SATA channel. SATA also has it's own new style power connector, not the old molex. Although my SATA Maxtor drive has both, but I used molex as my PSU didn't have any SATA power connectors. SATA also uses nice thing cables, not stupidly wide ribbon type cables.

As for RAID over IDE and SATA, it is just a clever controller.

Heh. I'm so confused.

I don't know anything anymore...

Are IDE and S-ATA different? I have an HDD that supports both...

And can RAID-0 be implement over both? And if so, how?

I die.

Ahaha. See, RAID should come with some sort of security where if you don't have at least an A+ or 2 years on ocforums.com or an Ars Technica subscription then you can't use RAID.

I know someone who went for RAID on his desktop. He defragged the drives and killed them.

Yeah, I think I'll go for the Maxtor.
Cheers.

Um, fine unless you want a RAID array? Eh? You can run IDE drives in RAID arrays. Some boards even let you mix IDE and SATA drives in arrays. Besides, RAID has no place on the desktop, it doesn't have any noticable speed benefit outside of a server system.

Don't use speed as an excuse either, I have a SATA drive and like all SATA drives it gets nowhere near the max theoretical throughput of SATA. My record was a sustained 60 Mb/s - which would not even have pushed UDMA 66 IDE to the max.

Azul, it is alright, not bad for the size, but again only has a 2 MB buffer. Bigger buffers are better, because they "speed" the drive up.

Perhaps:
[URL]http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=2570703517&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=40468[/URL]
[URL]http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/maxtor_ide.html[/URL] - third one down.
[URL]http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/seagate_ide.html[/URL]

I tend to get Maxtor's these days. Entirely up to you.

Nice, but IDE.

Which is fine, I guess, unless you want a RAID array, which I assumed because it's so good.

[URL]http://www.ebuyer.com/customer/products/index.html?rb=2567259407&action=c2hvd19wcm9kdWN0X292ZXJ2aWV3&product_uid=40467[/URL]

Thoughts?