Best SATA Hard Drive??

[matt_hobson]

I am finding all the bits to put together my own PC. I have decided that i dont want a Raptor as i am not THAT fussed about the HDD speed, but i want a top of the range 160GB hard drive, for under £100.

SO far i have set on the Seagate 7200.7

I have a few questions tho. Looking at dabs, i have a choice to make:

Barracuda 7200.7 160GB SATA150 -- ST3160023AS -- £93.50
OR
Barracuda7200.7+ 160GB UDMA100 -- ST3160023A -- £86.01
OR
Barracuda 7200.7 160GB UDMA100 -- ST3160021A -- £79.00


Firstly what is the difference between the last 2??

Second should i go for SATA150 or UDMA100?

The only one with details is the middle one...

have a look here:

Dabs HDD's

select Seagate as the manufacturer and set price range from 0 - 100, and click the down arrow by "Price", the first three should be the ones i have shown above..

cheers guys,

matt


[EDIT]

Just had a look at my mobo interfaces:

Storage Controller RAID
RAID Level RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 10
Controller Interface Type Serial ATA-150
Storage Controller (2nd) IDE
Controller (2nd) Interface Type DMA/ATA-100 (Ultra)

I have heard that RAID is better??? - True?

Does this mean that i should go for the SATA 150 over the ATA-100 as the second one uses IDE??

any help would be great guys,

Matt

[/EDIT]

[blockers]

Firstly, i dont know the difference between the last two hard drives. There is not a lot of difference that you woudl notice, however if you can afford the SATA it is better to go for that, as it is faster (only a mild contradiction....hehe) If you have a SATA power connector with your PSU, and SATA cables for the motherboard then go for SATA. If you dont i woudl say that it isnt worth going to SATA, as you would have to fork out more money for cabling etc.

RAID is a bit better than single hard drive, by about 10-15% performance. There are 3 types of RAID. 0 is stripping, which makes the two hard drives into one, this is faster performance, but if one hard drive knackers all the data is lost. 1 is mirroring, which is a back up of the first drive. and 0+1 is stripping and mirroring - not really sure what that does....some combination of both.

[directhex]

the difference is likely to be cache, i would assume. or maybe a sensible warranty.

and there are actually five "real" RAID systems, RAID1-5, plus RAID0 which can be combined with any of the other forms. RAID 2-4 are deprecated, and 0 greatly increases your chances of data loss (as if 1 drive in a RAID0 array blows, you lose the data on both).

In answer to the original question tho, Samsung P80 series drives \o/

[Swafe]

all the same pretty much, apart from the one with 8mb instead of 2mb cache is better, if one has it or not

if you want the best SATA drive, 76GB 10Krpm raptor

[funnelhead]

way to read the post Swafeman you fool. Go back to using credit cards, you're good at that

[Swafe]

unfortunutly

[matt_hobson]

thanks for the replies people.

In answer to the original question tho, Samsung P80 series drives \o/

really??

I did have one of these in, but because most people in other forums + a lot of reviews go mental about the Seagate 7200.7 as it is VERY quiet, i started looking into that one.

i did have the:

Hard Drive - SpinPoint P80 160GB SATA150 - Samsung
Spinpoint
Price: £84.00from Dabs


oh, and the PSU is SATA ready..
PSU

[Spud1]

well i currently have 2xmaxtor 120gig Sata drives (8meg cache) running in a RAID0 config and its great =) very fast and fairly quiet

bought from overclockers ofc =)

[directhex]

samsung is MUCH quieter than seagate, in my experience

and faster too

[Lee H]

I'd get the seagates over any other SATA drive and here is the reason why ( geek mode activated )

Seagate DESIGNED serial ATA with intel and their drives are "true" SATA drives rather than having a SATA->PATA bridging system like the other drives. basically this means that all the other drives are designed using the same technology as the PATA drives but they have added a bridging system and a convertor so they can connect to the SATA.

Seagates also are the only drives to use Cyclic Redundancy Checking and they also have the ability to use Native Command Queuing. Seagate's 7200.7 is the only native SATA interface commercially available as its a true SATA connection and not a psuedo drive.

Riiiiiiiight Hope this technobabble has helped - I'll turn off geek mode now and go and do some work

Lee

[directhex]

for now a hard disk isn't gonna push 150mb/sec (or even 100). drives like the WD Raptor use the same Marvell SERDES chip everyone else does, and there's no real loss in speed. People will transition to a pure sata solution when they shift more SATA units - until then there's no economy in producing entirely different SATA/IDE parts, rather than a (better selling) IDE base being modified for the nicer cabling system

[DR]

We use Barracuda 7200.7 160GB SATA150 since it has the command line cueing and it is faster than the WD in everday use.

[Scott Fish]

The difference between the two IDE drives is the cache size. Seagate do a "normal" and a "Plus" drive, the normal one has 2Mb cache and the plus one has 8Mb.

[Lexeus]

I'd get the seagates over any other SATA drive and here is the reason why ( geek mode activated )

Seagate DESIGNED serial ATA with intel and their drives are "true" SATA drives rather than having a SATA->PATA bridging system like the other drives. basically this means that all the other drives are designed using the same technology as the PATA drives but they have added a bridging system and a convertor so they can connect to the SATA.

Seagates also are the only drives to use Cyclic Redundancy Checking and they also have the ability to use Native Command Queuing. Seagate's 7200.7 is the only native SATA interface commercially available as its a true SATA connection and not a psuedo drive.

Riiiiiiiight Hope this technobabble has helped - I'll turn off geek mode now and go and do some work

Lee

Back into geek mode

to expand on that, Yes, the Seagte 7200.7 is definitely the one to go for. In terms of numbers the Seagte 7200.7 SATA drive has double the write speed of other drives.
I have the 160Gb 7200.7 from ebuyer, it is a great drive, and I have had no probs at all from it.

If I can just find the magazine I read about it in I can give you some actual figures

[Lexeus]

ok, looked it up, its not double, but it has a write speed of 40mb/s compared to that of the IBM desktar 7K250 IDE drive, which has a write speed of 28mbps, so its pretty good

[Apex]

Samsung p80 range