what SATA drive to replace the SCSI one?

skanky

skanky

skanky

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i've got a noisy all hell atlas 10k in my machine and using it as my boot drive, which is nice, but its 18gb (stop laughing!) and my mobo only has 2 ide ports and they're being used by a 250gb seagate (backup/storage drive mainly) i think and a dvdrw.

i need a drive to replace the scsi as the boot drive as the place where i store my apps/games/os etc. i'm looking for a drive that is (in this order):
-relatively quiet (i know super quiet will hamper the speed a bit but the seek noise is driving me nuts!)
-fast (dont need raptor fast at the expense of noise but dont want a slow drive either)
-decent space

ideally a 200gb+ drive that will work with an Asus P5B mobo.
 
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If you want 200Gb+ then the only real options are either the Seagate 7200.10 or the WD AAKS. The Seagate is available in 200Gb upwards with 320 or 400Gb giving the best bang for buck, the WD however is only a 500Gb part at the moment.
 
I replaced my 15K scsi (OS/games disk) with a 7200.10, I certainly dont miss the noisy hot thing, and i cant say i notice any real performance differences apart from disk benchmarks.
 
thanks for all the advice, i read about it being a bit of a lottery when it came to 7200.10's so avoided those.

in the end as my priority was noise above all others i opted for the 320gb samsung, was going to go for the 250gb one but noticed it only had 8mb cache whereas the 320gb has 16mb. if its slow i'll get another one and RAID0 it :)

since this is my first SATA drive, i know you have to install "drivers" when installing windows on it. where do i get said drivers for vista?

the only thing i could find on samsung's homepage are disk formatting utils: http://www.samsung.com/Products/HardDiskDrive/utilities/index.htm
 
skanky said:
since this is my first SATA drive, i know you have to install "drivers" when installing windows on it. where do i get said drivers for vista?
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The drivers are for the SATA controller, not the drive. However most modern SATA implementations can be set to run single drives in a legacy mode which doesn't require any drivers.

What board are you going to attach the drive to?
 
wont running in legacy mode affect performance though?

edit: had a quick poke around the asus website and couldnt find sata drivers anywhere :/
 
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rpstewart said:
If you're using any form of RAID then you will need drivers. However now I'm a bit confused, I thought you were only putting in a single drive?
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single drive for now, but i am looking at the possibility at raid0'ing in the near future which would mean a reinstall.
 
replaced the atlas10k with a 320gb spinpoint and put the scsi drive+card into my sc750 server case and ohmygod it makes such a racket on seek operations, i never truely appreciated my cm200 with akasa sound deadening material on the side panels until now!
 
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