The hard drive choice

[stu]

Hi,

I'm looking for a new hard drive. I'd like to buy a 250 Gb (cause I need place) in IDE. Please don't talk me about SATA2, I tried and was impossible to make work properly. Then it'll be an IDE 133. The gain in perf is not amazing in SATA.

Anyway, could you help me about the brand and model I should choose for less than 100 euros?

See you.

[MaXMhZ]

I recently bought a Samsung Spinpoint 300GB drive for 92 euro - it's an UDMA 7200rpm IDE drive, VERY quiet, Ultra DMA mode 5 I can highly recommend this drive. You do need an 80 wire IDE cable for mode 5
(133-166MB/s) to work though.
Seems it just dropped in price to 84 euro.
direct link to the dutch online firm I bought it

[stu]

Hi, thx for reply.

I just need to be sure my MB can run with the Samsung Spinpoint 300GB AND the IDE cable 80 wire for mode 5 (133-166MB/s).

-----------------------------------------------------------

If somebody could check my config to verify it's OK:

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition - Service Pack 2
AMD Athlon 64, 2200 MHz 3500+
ASRock 939Dual-SATA2 (3 PCI, 1 PCI-E x1, 1 PCI-E x16, 1 AGP, 1 Future CPU Port, 4 DDR DIMM, Audio, LAN)
Asus NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT
4 x 512 Mo
IBM Deskstar 180GXP 120 Go Ultra-ATA/100 - Cache 8 Mo & Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 40016 40 Go Ultra-ATA/100 - Cache 2 Mo
CD : LITE-ON LTR-24102B
DVD : BenQ DVD DD DW1650

[MaXMhZ]

If your MoBo has an IDE interface (99.9% have) there should be no problem.
The "" 80-wire" just means that it's a 40 wire (normal IDE connectors) with extra shielding between the wires to make the higher throughput run smoothly.Normally these cables are not installed as standard to save a few cents on selling a basic computer. If you connect one drive to an IDE cable, allways make sure you connect it at the end of the cable and not in the middle. If you would connect it in the middle position and leave the end to the second drive dangling around this could cause echoes on the cable that can result in signal failure and errors. The best (and fastest) way is to connect the primary (boot)drive to one IDE channel on the MoBo and the secundary drive to the other IDE channel and set Windows up to have it's swap file on the second drive. This way the IDE controller will perform any transfer between the drives completely in hardware (reading and writing at the same time).Especially if you perform video editing e.g. this can increase performance noticibly To set the drive up in Windows to use the faster (U)DMA mode, you need to go into Device Manager:

Click Start,

Rightclick My Computer - Select Properties
Click the "Device Manager" button under the "Hardware" tab
Double click the IDE/ATA/ATAPI Controllers,right click
the primary or Secundary IDE Channel depending on what channel the drive is connected to,
select "Properties"

select Ädvanced" tab at the top, and in the second drop down box from the top select "DMA if available" and not "PIO mode" (which is a lot slower)
If the Samsung is connected the "transfer mode"should now say "DMA mode 5"


Click OK button
Best check both channels are set to DMA this way.
Unless you have a very expensive optical drive, there is no need for the somewhat more expensive 80-wire cable on this. You could check it's set to DMA mode though (DMA mode 2 is supported by most optical drives)
.

Reboot

Done
Samsung has smaller-sized (cheaper) models in the Spinpoint series too.

Good luck with the new drive!


Hope this helps

MaX

[stu]

Sure it helps

I'll take time to read again your post and try to find this disk and cable on a French Internet site.

A good unique topic could be "how to set your PC to optimize it" for flying in our case.

Thanks a lot MaxMhz.

[MaXMhZ]

Thank you. When I find the time to do so I'll set up something simular
























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