Best IDE Hard Drive?

Davey_Pitch

Davey_Pitch

Davey_Pitch

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I get the impression my current WD 80GB HDD is starting to die (getting noisier, occasionally hanging when booting into Windows), so I'd like to get a replacement fairly soon before I lose all my data on the drive. Not really been keeping up with HDD's lately, so not really sure what's best any more. 160GB will be roughly the size I'm after, I shouldn't need much more room than that. Thanks for any help :)
 
Personally i'd go for either;

Western Digital Caviar Special Edition 160GB 1600JB ATA-100 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-005-WD)
or
Samsung SpinPoint P SP1634N 160GB ATA-133 8MB Cache - OEM (HD-009-SA)

Have you considered getting a SATA drive? If your motherboard doesn't have sata ports, it might be worth getting a controller card. If you do this, a drive that might be worth looking at is;

Western Digital Raptor 150GB WD1500ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM (HD-069-WD)
 
Davey_Pitch said:
Hmmm, not thought of that. Pretty similar price wise, with the controller card being the only extra cost. I presume I can still run an IDE drive as a slave with the SATA drive as master?
Click to expand...
Don't quote me on this, but here's my effort.

On my motherboard I have 4 SATA ports for the Intel controller (maybe 2, but I'm sure it's 4).

Each port is labelled as Primary Master, P. Slave, Secondary Master, S. Slave. You get the idea.

Because the drives are on a different controller, it shouldn't affect the drives on the IDE controller. The IDE controller will have it's own set of labels, for the two ports (two devices on each port, with IDE).

drives.gif


In even numbered screenshot, where Transfer Mode is select, is the SATA controller. Hopefully, that clarifies things for you.
 
Well adding a SATA to the equation doesn't actually give you the option per se to run slave/master. Unfortunately IDE's are always seen first and you should just leave it on Master or cable select with the SATA card installed. What you need to do (as SATA HDU's have no master slave) is just set the boot priority in BIOS to either boot from the SATA controller card or boot from the drive. What motherboard do you have? I'll look into the options that would need changing going this route -and yes, do get a SATA. My preference has always been Seagate, followed by Hitachi and Western Digital. Seagate = reliability. Hitachi = speed, good reliablity, WD = all-rounder but note the lack of NCQ (makes little difference in home user environment but can come in handy - free features are always a good thing :p).
 
Luckily for you Davey, you have an AWARD BIOS (so much easier to use) - manual here. P57 onwards.

If you did buy an add-in SATA card, all you would need to do is adjust a few settings in Advanced BIOS features. Depending on the controller, you may get another HDU in the options list numbered like HDD-0, HDD-1 etc. where you would only need to change the second boot device to the correct settings for the SATA drive. Some SATA controllers default to a pseudo-SCSI device so it might be required to set SCSI in this box. Hope that helps :).
 
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