First thanks for all the comments on my oroposed spec - lots of food for thought.
Can somebody give me a numpties guide to hard drives, what is the benefit of SATA and RAID
One thing I want to do with my computer is use it to recieve digital TV, play it on the monitor and or tv screen and obviuosly use it as a recorder. I believe this may use up to 2 gig p/h and so even a 120 gig hard drive may fill up quite quickly.
Would I benefit from 2 hdd in the fullness of time and can I dedicate one of these to recording
Windog


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Well basicly the first thing is the key interface. Current ones are ATA100, ATA133 and SATA150, SCSI is high end stuff and way expensive. The higher number the lower the CPU usage and the higher the theoretical bandwidth, but even 100MB/s (ATA100) is rarely limiting. ATA is also known as PATA (Parrallel ATA) whereas SATA (Serial ATA) is the new std but unlike the ATA133/100/66/33 it is not pin compatible (or even power compatible).
SATA has a few key benefits over PATA, firstly lower CPU usage and higher bandwidth but neither of those are truly significant for current drives. Next is the potential for hot swapping, plugging and unplugging drives while the power is on. Then there is the lower power draw and the better designed cables (small so don't inhibit airflow). PATA generally comes in the form of 2 connectors on your mobo, each able to handle 2 devices (HD, CD, DVD etc)with one as the Master and the other a Slave which is set by jumpers on the back of the drives (they share the cables bandwidth) ... SATA is dedicated to one drive and gives all the bandwidth, so no more sharing nor Master/Slave stuff. Finally (AFAIK) SATA drives tend to always be 7200rpm with 8MB and are generally slightly faster than their PATA counterparts. For most things the average user will do an ATA100 7200rpm 2MB HD is more than adequate.
This is all to the best of my knowledge so don't take it as 100% accurate.

