HDD Question

tntcoder · 22 Feb 2006 at 17:23

Hey,

I have an old pc which is about 500mhz or something similar, I want to put some big HDDs in it and i assume that because its old it has that strange IDE HDD size limit thing? I have XP (just) running on the box. If i wanted to use SATA drives on it, and got a SATA 2 port pci card, would I notice any poor performance in terms of reading speed of the hdds?

Thanks
Jack

jonnyg · 22 Feb 2006 at 20:23

You would have a bottleneck caused by the CPU and PCI bus that would decrease the speed of data transfer... Im not sure of any CPU limitations on HDD file size limiting. I know that FAT32 has a 4Gb file limit, but im sure that it would only be Windows that would prevent detection of any drives... Having XP would probably eliminate any drive size problems that i can think of. Hope that helps...

BTW, are you making a file server?

darreny · 22 Feb 2006 at 20:43

also looking at doing this, do sata drives use the same power cable as IDE

Cyber-Mav · 22 Feb 2006 at 20:45

most old boards have a limit around 127gb.

make sure your bios is up to date.

tom_e · 22 Feb 2006 at 20:51

if your using a pci sata card the mb bios limit doesnt apply and nope most but not all sata hdd use a sata power cable

tntcoder · 22 Feb 2006 at 22:10

Hi, what i had in mind was a media center/stream server. But i guess its a bit of a problem if i will experience a bottleneck using PCI for sata :confused: