Just bought a "IDE" HDD, wrong one?

beast · 22 Nov 2006 at 01:14

As above, I'm not terribly good with computers (shock horror) and went and chose an IDE drive for the pc I'm building. I then noticed "SATA" ones on the other page :rolleyes:

Have I chose the "wrong" one? or will it be okay?

Zefan · 22 Nov 2006 at 01:16

If you're motherboard's got an IDE port then it will work, whether it'll be as fast as a SATA drive is debatable.

Craig321 · 22 Nov 2006 at 01:31

Zefan said:
If you're motherboard's got an IDE port then it will work, whether it'll be as fast as a SATA drive is debatable.

I doubt much of a difference will be noticed between SATA and IDE when normally using Windows.

Cyber-Mav · 22 Nov 2006 at 01:36

burst speeds are more than twice as fast on sata2 than on ide. on ide you can get max burst speed of 133mb per second but on sata2 you can get 300megs per second.

but that means jack all. onlything useful from sata is thinner cables, and tagged/native command queuing, if you don;t know what they are then more than likley they are of no use to you.

--ki-- · 22 Nov 2006 at 20:34

Hate to sound pedantic, but SATA is IDE, calling a PATA drive IDE to sperate it from SATA is a misnomer. All commercial desktop boards support IDE, this can mean it has PATA, SATA or both.

Also even though burst speeds are irrelevant SATA2 does as has beens stated have command queuing and generally a faster overall sustained speed (platter size transparent) and random access speed for both reads and writes.