Harddrive advice please!

A female! We don't get many of those round these parts

ANYWAY - Forget about SATA, it's definatly not worth it espesially if you need to buy an add-in card. There is not speed increae, as the harddrive's themselves are the limiting factor, not the BUS they run off.

As for brands, any of the following are fine:
Maxtor
Western Digital
Seagate

If your looking at 250g you might try looking at Maxtor Diamond Plus 10 series harddrives. They are 7200RPM drives, and I think the 250G comes with 16Mb of cache (wheras most harddrives today only come with 2 or 8).

Other people will probably post some other options too.

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Hello Rebecca,

Standard IDE would work without any issues for you.

I have always been a fan of Seagate, and I purchase Western Digital drives as well. I have, for me, avoided Maxtor but I know a lot of people that have them and they do sell a lot of drives in general.

I have never been a fan of Fujitsu of Hitachi.

A few potential caveats and a couple other notes though.

Almost ALL motherboads currently being sold have two standard IDE controllers build onto the motherboard, but there are some that are sold with ONLY one IDE controller on the motherboard.

Each IDE controller is supposed to handle two drives by specification. (I don't think any are being built anymore that are limited to ONLY one drive per controller so you should be safe there.)

You are probably 90-95% safe in assuming that the motherboard will have two IDE controllers, that can handle two IDE drives each. I just wanted to point out it could be an issue.

Also of importance is how many hard drives and CD-ROM's are there currently installed? (Almost all CD-ROM's use IDE so I am just assuming that to be the case here.)

If there are already 4 of these type of devices total, then there is likely an issue. You will most likely need an additional controller.

Lastly, if you are are not sure if your fiance knows how to install the drive check with CompUSA because I think they will include installation on hard drives purchased at their stores. You can also look for a local computer store and ask them as well.

I would recommend a maxtor or western digital drive also Rebs, you should be able to pick up a 250/300 for fairly cheap and if you look really hard you should be able to get a good deal so keep your eyes open for the best one.

The maxtor 10s with 16mb cache are the shizznit tho from what i hear, you wanna pick one up for me too??

Merry Christmas,

Ps Keep an eye on http://www.pricegrabber.com/

Seagate has a 5 years warranty on their drive. I mostly use Seagate for that reason. The 200 or 250 or 300 or ...400Gigs HDD could fit what you're looking for (but take the one that fit your budget!). Maybe he'd like that drive in SATA with a SATA controller card. His next system will surely have SATA headers so he will be able to move that drive to his new system. Maybe he'd like to have a SATA RAID card and 2 x 160 gigs for about 320gigs (stripped mode (RAID0)) with better performance and cheaper than a single 300 Gigs HDD... But maybe he dont have enough place to put 2 more drive in his system too... so only one will be the option!

Hope that did not confuse you more ...

-Always put the blame on you first, then on the hardware !!!