IDE or Sata?

joroma

joroma

joroma

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Just a quicky.

My Maxtor 160gb SATA HDD is on the way out (SMART warning at start up) so I need to buy a new one. I'm more interested in reliability than anything else so what is best IDE or SATA and which make is the most reliable? My budget is about £55/£60 for the new drive (160gb again).
 
I'd go SATA personally - but I'm not sure how the reliability compares to IDE - my guess is that they will be very similar.

Seagate are well known for having good reliability and Samsung are getting good reviews for being quiet as well as reliable. And also Hitachi are meant to be very good all-rounders just now.

All 3 of them seem to have 160Gb SATA drives at around the £50 mark.

Hard drives are pretty much personal preference - so I'm not too sure what else to say!

Oh the only "issue" I have with SATA is the connection between the cable and the drive. Its a samll cable and small connector - and tbh the connection doesnt seem great. Its quite easy to knock a cable off in the case if you've got it open for some reason.

That being said its never actually given me any reliability issues - and I've had 4 SATA drives for some time now. But its the one thing that I can think of.....
 
Ive read terrible reviews about maxtor.

that is why i replaced it with a samsung spinpoint sata2 160.

use my maxtor 200gb as backup

but ive had no problems with either... maxtor i have is ide
 
SATA drives are still based mechanically on the same internals as IDE drives so there should be absolutely no difference in reliability on that score. As mentioned the cables are a bit easier to knock out of place but that isn't really a big deal unless you are often mucking about inside your PC.

I don't know about the most reliable drive but you could take a look at the poll results for anecdotal evidence if that helps :)
 
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