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New gaming rig...sata1 still okay?

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  • Hard Drives
  • Storage
Last response: in Storage
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April 21, 2008 6:25:27 AM

I'm building a new rig for Age of Conan. Specs:

C2D E8400 (hope to overclock to 4.0ghz) with zalman 9700 cooler
evga 9800gtx
gigabyte ga-ep35-ds3r motherboard
ocz reaper 2x2gb ram

I'm buying pretty much new everything except hard drives. I still have my two old SATA 1 drives.
Seagate 160gb: ST316002 3AS
Seagate 320gb: ST332062 0AS

Are these still good? Do i need to upgrade to SATA2 or get some raptors or something? Basically...will these drives bottle neck me at all?

More about : gaming rig sata1

April 21, 2008 6:37:54 PM

it's not really an issue of sata1 vs. sata2 but more of an issue of platter density due to the fact that even the Raptor doesn't use all the bandwidth available with sata1. The 160gb drive you have is a 7200.7 and if I'm not mistaken the other one is a 7200.8. The 7200.7 drive you have has a areal density of 100GB per platter while the other (if a 7200.8) is 133GB. The new 7200.11 drives have 250GB platters which means you can stuff more information in a smaller area with less platters allowing your read heads to be able to access the information quicker.

The short answer is yes the drives will work and yes you will get bottlenecked compared to a newer drive. The choice is yours, I still have a 7200.7 in my current system which I use for extra storage but it is too slow to use as a system drive (I use a 7200.11 for that).
April 21, 2008 6:53:07 PM

Short answer, you won't have to worry about it. SATA 2 300MBP/s is "cool" but hard drives don't transfer that fast anyway.
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April 21, 2008 7:08:26 PM

boonality said:
Short answer, you won't have to worry about it. SATA 2 300MBP/s is "cool" but hard drives don't transfer that fast anyway.

The only thing is that newer drives advertised with SATA II support are infact newer, performing better in general. HDD always will bottleneck your system (its the slowest component in most cases).. but your drives should be able to handle your new system fine.
April 21, 2008 10:23:00 PM

make the 320gb one the os drive, it's faster.
!