Im gonna buy a new hdd but im at a loss which to choose.
Should i stick with IDE or is SATA much better?
I have been looking at these 3 models:
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 80GB 8MB Cache - OEM
Western Digital Caviar 80GB Special Edition 8MB Cache - OEM
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus9 Serial ATA 80GB 8MB Cache - OEM
Out of the IDE drives a lot off peeps seem to be going for the WD drives but why?
Maxtor is like ATA133 and WD only ATA100, wouldnt the maxtor be better/faster one to go for?
id be grateful for any advice
Thx


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Regarding Maxtor's warranties I heard and read (IIRC) that they dropped to a 1 year warranty in line with the rest of the HD manus. WD retained 3 year for its SE HDs (namely their 7200-8). When SATA appeared Maxtor gave 3 years with its HDs, I'm not sure of other SATA HDs from other manu also give 3 year or not. This is AFAIK and policies may have changed since anyway. IIRC somewhere on the Maxtor site (RMA?) you can put in the details written on top of your HD and it will tell you the warranty you have etc. If I get chance (and someone doesn't beat me to it) I'll look into it ... got to go cook now!

AFAIK there are only two types of std IDE (PATA) cable. The classic stuff capable of up to ATA33 and the enhanced ATA66 ones which can go all the way up to ATA133. That's what I thought anyway. It is true that Maxtor own the rights to ATA133 and that's why so few HD manus have adopted it, they need to pay a fee to Maxtor if they use it and SATA150 was right around the corner anyway.
Win2000 & XP use the Control Panel -> Admin Tools -> Computer Man -> Disk Man to have control over the HDs. AFAIK, I did feel a little disorientated myself after being so used to FDISK and Win9x. To verify your HD (like 9x Scandisk) you can r.click your drive (eg in 'My Computer') then select 'Properties' -> 'Tools' where you get the option to run Scandisk(ish) or Defrag. Click 'Check Now' and you can select a std check, check for system file errors and check for bad sectors (full surface scan). How you find out what errors were fixed is beyond me as there's no longer a log file in root.
