I just got a 200GB PATA Western Digital drive from Sam's Club, for $150. Good deal. (fyi)
hmm.. i wasnt sure thats why i was asking in the very beginning. i concluded that it was the RAM more than the HD.
I just jumped in, because I saw a bunch of people telling you to upgrade your HDD to fix your problems, and I couldn't figure out why. A new HDD would give you more storage, but leave you still having this crippling stuttering and long load times in games and applications.
I don't see any reason to worry about a SATA controller "burdening" the PCI bus. The PCI bus can handle about 3x the transfer rate you'd get out of a typical drive, and under normal operation of the computer you would never be sharing bandwidth between HD reads/writes and any other intensive IO operation. The graphics card has its own separate bus, so the only thing left to share with is sound and ethernet. The only bandwidth hog you'd share HDD access with would be video capture with local echo of the video and sound, which won't work very well without RAID anyway.
That, and your built-in PATA controller <b>is</b> part of the PCI bus. It connects just like any other PCI device, it's just hard-wired on the motherboard instead of going through a removable connector. So you're already "burdening" the PCI bus with hard drive reads/writes. And, also, getting more RAM would <i>reduce</i> this 'burden', because you will no longer be constantly swapping your memory between RAM and virtual-memory swapfile during normal operation of the PC.
I can tell you from experience that not switching to SATA now will mean you'll wish you had later. I'm having a really difficult time finding decent PATA controllers and hard drive enclosures for my RAID setup. If only I'd bought SATA components a year ago, I could build a much better RAID setup now, but now I have four PATA 200GB drives and three PATA 60GB drives and it's too expensive to switch over and ditch all those PATA drives. (unfortunately PATA->SATA converters won't fit inside hot-swap bays.)
You could get a SATA drive, and a SATA->PATA converter for it, and be ready to plug the drive into a SATA system when you have one.
I highly suggest you upgrade your RAM. It's very, very cheap to get a second 256 or 512 stick. It probably costs about the same as a week or two worth of gas for your car, and all your games, applications, email, internet, EVERYTHING will start performing better. No point in having a bunch of storage on a system that's crippled by its low ram, unless you pretty much spend your PC time doing email and web pages and listening to MP3s and nothing else.
Here's one attractive option that might solve both problems:
Recent shopping (2 months ago) led me to get 80GB Seagate drives for two computers where I had to keep costs at an <i>absolute MINIMUM</i> while still putting in good components. I got 80GB Seagates because they are reputed to be quiet (and they really are, I'd clap my hands in applause but it would ruin the silence) and the price of the 80GB Seagate drives was only $12 to $16 over the cost of the lowest price 40GB Maxtor or WD hard drives I could find. 80GB should be plenty of space for your type of computer use, and you should be able to get a second stick of RAM with the money you save off the larger drives. So I say go with one Seagate 80GB drive and one stick of RAM:
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProductDesc.asp?description=22-148-015R&depa=0" target="_new">80GB Seagate</A> : $50
and one of:
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductdesc.asp?description=20-141-425&depa=1" target="_new">Kingston 256MB PC3200 DDR</A> : $45
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductdesc.asp?description=20-146-533&depa=1" target="_new">Crucial 256MB PC3200 DDR</A> : $46
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductdesc.asp?description=20-207-010&depa=1" target="_new">Off-Brand 512MB PC3200 DDR</A> : $66
<A HREF="http://www.newegg.com/app/viewProductdesc.asp?description=20-141-424&depa=1" target="_new">Kingston 512MB PC3200 DDR</A> : $82
Punching in the serial number on their website informs me that it has a 6 month warranty...fair enough for me 'cause I picked up three of them at once during a special sale way back when.
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