Newbie needs help: Hard Drives

[dlea555]

I am looking at building a computer sometime in the future but before I do that I need to know about the parts. I have been looking around at hard drives and information on them but i'm confused about the different types of hard drives, connectors etc so I need help and hopefully I can get to know all about them. If you reply please don't go too technical as I won't understand it so the information would be pretty useless to me.

Below is a list of things i've come across and would like to know more information about (and any others I may have missed which I may come across one day):

IDE, EIDE, ATA, SCSI, SATA, Ultra-ATA, RAID, Ultra DMA

I would like to know things such as what they all are, what is required for these to work e.g. what type of cables etc and please remember not to go too technical. If you could find pictures of these it would also help (especially of the cables required)

If you could please layout your replies like the example below:

RAID
What it is:
What is required for it to work: e.g. Motherboard that supports it, types of cables etc
Other info that may be important:


I know this may be a bit of a hassle but if you could help me I would really appreciate it and it may also help others who are in similar positions to me. I'll almost certainly have the same sort of questions for things like memory and motherboards etc if I get enough help.

Thanks in advance to all who reply.

----- Dave

[nvening]

SCSI is for servers, forget that. The newest is SATA, it has replaced the others (half of which are the same thing, given different names) and thats what you want. Raid is basically more than one HDD working together in some way, depending on how it is setup.

[dlea555]

SCSI is for servers, forget that. The newest is SATA, it has replaced the others (half of which are the same thing, given different names) and thats what you want. Raid is basically more than one HDD working together in some way, depending on how it is setup.

Could you tell me which ones are the same things as I don't have a clue and possibly give an example of a raid setup?

Thanks for the reply

----- Dave

[Taz]

Here you go:

http://www.hardwarefusion.net/index....e=jargonbuster

And here's an even better one found via Google:

http://www.directron.com/harddrive.html

Plain and simple jargon buster. I hope that helps.

[dlea555]

Here you go:

http://www.hardwarefusion.net/index....e=jargonbuster

And here's an even better one found via Google:

http://www.directron.com/harddrive.html

Plain and simple jargon buster. I hope that helps.

Thanks for those. Doesn't clear everything up for me but has gone a little way to helping me get my head round it all.

Just a few questions:
1. Does EIDE use normal IDE cables or does it use different ones?
2. Whats cables do SATA drives use?
3. I've found that ATA is IDE, ATA-2 is EIDE, ATA-3 is Ultra-ATA what are ATA-4 and ATA-5?

I'll have more questions but thats all I can think of at the moment.

----- Dave

[Nemeliza]

1. Does EIDE use normal IDE cables or does it use different ones?

Same

Abbreviation of either Intelligent Drive Electronics or Integrated Drive Electronics, depending on who you ask. An IDE interface is an interface for mass storage devices, in which the controller is integrated into the disk or CD-ROM drive.

2. Whats cables do SATA drives use?

SATA cables

3. I've found that ATA is IDE, ATA-2 is EIDE, ATA-3 is Ultra-ATA what are ATA-4 and ATA-5?

Short for Advanced Technology Attachment, a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are several versions of ATA, all developed by the Small Form Factor (SFF) Committee:
# ATA: Known also as IDE, supports one or two hard drives, a 16-bit interface and PIO modes 0, 1 and 2.
# ATA-2: Supports faster PIO modes (3 and 4) and multiword DMA modes (1 and 2). Also supports logical block addressing (LBA) and block transfers. ATA-2 is marketed as Fast ATA and Enhanced IDE (EIDE).
# ATA-3: Minor revision to ATA-2.
# Ultra-ATA: Also called Ultra-DMA, ATA-33, and DMA-33, supports multiword DMA mode 3 running at 33 MBps.
# ATA/66: A version of ATA proposed by Quantum Corporation, and supported by Intel, that doubles ATA's throughput to 66 MBps.
# ATA/100: An updated version of ATA/66 that increases data transfer rates to 100 MBps.

ATA also is called Parallel ATA.

[mike_w]

Essentially, there are two main types of hard drives - PATA and SATA. PATA is often called normal ATA/IDE/EIDE, and is probably the most common. SATA uses a different cable, and is technically faster, although the limiting factor of hard drives is apparently not the speed of cable, but the actual mechanical speed of the hard drive itself (i.e. SATA doesn't really give much of a speed boost over PATA)

RAID can provide a speed boost and the ability to recover from hard drive failures, the main problem being the high cost. This site provides lots of information about the different RAID versions: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

Edit: This site is the best site I've found for reviews of hard disk drives: http://www.storagereview.com/

[dlea555]

Essentially, there are two main types of hard drives - PATA and SATA. PATA is often called normal ATA/IDE/EIDE, and is probably the most common. SATA uses a different cable, and is technically faster, although the limiting factor of hard drives is apparently not the speed of cable, but the actual mechanical speed of the hard drive itself (i.e. SATA doesn't really give much of a speed boost over PATA)

RAID can provide a speed boost and the ability to recover from hard drive failures, the main problem being the high cost. This site provides lots of information about the different RAID versions: http://www.acnc.com/04_01_00.html

Edit: This site is the best site I've found for reviews of hard disk drives: http://www.storagereview.com/

Thanks for the Info Nemeliza and mike_w. I haven't had time to have a good look at those links but the first one seems to spell it out for you which is what I need.

A couple more questions:
1. Would I be right in saying that the versions of ATA that Nemeliza listed: ATA, ATA-2, ATA-3, ATA/66, ATA/100 all use IDE cables?

2. What temperature should 5400rpm and 7200rpm hard drives be running at? I've got Everest Ultimate Edition on my computer and it says my 7200rpm Maxtor 6Y120P0 is running at 35 degrees. I haven't had any problems with it so I would presume thats OK?

Thanks again for all you help

----- Dave

[Nemeliza]

Parrallel ATA Drives use IDE cables
Serial ATA Drives use SATA cables

It is quite difficult to make a hard drive overheat they are quite tolerent when in normal use. for running temperatures see the manufactures websites on read the manual if you purchased a retail drive.
35 deg is fine.

[dlea555]

Thanks again for the help. I think after i've thoroughly read all the information in those links I'll know just about all I need to know for what I'm going to do.

I think the next topic of help is going to be memory as I know absolutely nothing about it and hopefully I'll recieve the same quality of help I got in this topic.

If anyone else wants to chip in with any good info then please do.

----- Dave

[mike_w]

Thanks again for the help. I think after i've thoroughly read all the information in those links I'll know just about all I need to know for what I'm going to do.

I think the next topic of help is going to be memory as I know absolutely nothing about it and hopefully I'll recieve the same quality of help I got in this topic.

If anyone else wants to chip in with any good info then please do.

----- Dave

If you're buying a modern PC, then there are two main types of memory: DDR and DDR2. Essentially, if you're buying a recent Pentium 4 motherboard, you want DDR2, whereas AMD motherboards take DDR.

Assuming you buy an AMD motherboard (which is probably best if you're mainly playing games) then the slowest memory you want want to buy would be PC3200. This means that it runs at 200mhz (3200 divided by 16), or 400DDR. Crucial do reliable, cheap memory, as do Corsair. You can buy more expensive memory, but I personally do not think it is worth the premium. You spend 50% more for what is often less than 10% improvement. The other reason for more expensive RAM is that it allows better overclocking, but that doesn't matter so much with Athlon 64s.

Explanation (skip down to the next paragraph if you don't care why): On CPUs, the clock speed is determined by FSB x multiplier. The multiplier only affects the CPU, but the FSB also affects the memory. On Athlon XPs, it was always best to keep the FSB and memory speed the same, otherwise you'd get a performance hit. Since the multiplier was locked on later Althon XPs (apart from the Mobile versions), the only way to increase the clock speed was to increase the FSB. That means that memory could potentially stop you from reaching the maximum clock speed since if the memory couldn't be stable at higher clock speeds, you couldn't really increase the FSB or clock speed of the CPU either. Therefore, faster memory meant faster CPUs. However, Athlon 64s don't really mind if the FSB is at the same speed as the memory, so you can raise the FSB while keeping the memory speed down. (Hope that made sense - you can shout at me if it didn't, and I'll try and explain it better)

As for how much, I would go for 2x512MB, since many recent games run best on that amount. 1 GB sticks tend to be expensive and quite slow, so I wouldn't recommend 2x1GB unless you really need it.

Hope that helps

Mike