HArd drive?

[1337infamous]

Whats the difference between all these hard drive types? Do you need a special mobo to run the different ones?

[peterhuang913]

There are basically two hard drive types: PATA and SATA. PATA is parallel ata and this is the older kind of hard drive. SATA or serial ata is the newer kind. A motherboard can either support PATA or SATA or both.

The kind of hard drive can also be divided into categories. There are 5400, 7200, and 10000 rpm drives. The 5400 and 7200 rpm drives are regular hard drives. The 10000 rpm drives are known as Raptor drives.

In the end, there are two basic types of hard drives. There is no special mobo required. A regular mobo will support either or both. IF you would rephrase your question, then I can help more.

[commandercup]

Originally Posted by peterhuang913

There are basically two hard drive types: PATA and SATA. PATA is parallel ata and this is the older kind of hard drive. SATA or serial ata is the newer kind. A motherboard can either support PATA or SATA or both.

The kind of hard drive can also be divided into categories. There are 5400, 7200, and 10000 rpm drives. The 5400 and 7200 rpm drives are regular hard drives. The 10000 rpm drives are known as Raptor drives.

In the end, there are two basic types of hard drives. There is no special mobo required. A regular mobo will support either or both. IF you would rephrase your question, then I can help more.

there are IDE hdd's too?

[peterhuang913]

Originally Posted by commandercup

there are IDE hdd's too?

My bad. IDE HDDs are now known as PATAs. In the old days, SATA wasn't out yet. People only used IDE HDDs.
IDE = ATA (old, unused term) = ATAPI (also old and unused) = PATA = EIDE (old).

[commandercup]

Originally Posted by peterhuang913

My bad. IDE HDDs are now known as PATAs. In the old days, SATA wasn't out yet. People only used IDE HDDs.
IDE = ATA (old, unused term) = ATAPI (also old and unused) = PATA = EIDE (old).

ahh ok cool thanks

you've got a surefire bet that IDE HDDs will work with your mobo since nearly all mobos have them (mainly used for CD/DVD Drives) although older 2-4 years might not have SATA on them especially if the mobo was bundled with your system (HP, Compaq, Dell etc.) or if its a budget mobo

[peterhuang913]

I think ALL mobos have IDE. SATA is on mobos less than 4 years old. SATA is on ALMOST ALL mobos less than 1-2 years old.

[mattsesar]

You will also hear about RAID setups. RAID (Redundant Array of Independent [or inexpensive] Drives) simply allows you to virtually join several HDD's together to form a single logical drive. For instance, if you have an 80GB HDD and a 120GB HDD in a RAID 0 format, your computer will recognize a single 200GB hard drive. You can also use RAID as a redundant storage system.. I'm not an expert on this as I don't use it, but for people who need extra data security, certain RAID setups will copy data sets (such as a Word document, for instance) onto both hard drives, essentially having two identical disks. If one of your drives was to ever suffer a fault, you would have all of your information available on the other.

I'm not an expert in RAID so if someone else wants to clarify (or correct) what I've said, please do so.

[djmaddogfreak]

I will clarify the RAID part.

RAID 0, min 2 disks- also known as stripe, you connect 2 or more IDENTICAL drives and they become known as one to the computer. For example, two 250 gig hard drives would show up as 1 500 gig to the computer. This improves performance and obviously storage capacity. Word of caution, if one hard drive fails, the data on any others are useless. This is because bite are written not in series on one drive, but in series across all the drives. For example, bit 1 goes to disk 1, then bit 2 goes to disk 2, then bit 3 goes back to disk 1, etc. You kind of put all your eggs in one basket when you do this... Your probability of one drive failing is now doubled because you have two drives, and again, if one fails, both are useless.

RAID 1 - Also known as mirror, you connect 2 IDENTICAL drives and they act as one, but the second drive is a mirror image of the first. Every byte that is written to the first drive, is written to the second. This is great for protecting your data from hard drive failure, and not having to worry about doing backups. If one hard drive crashes, just pop the other on in it's place.

There are ways to get like 4 hard drives and do a RAID 0+1 which will give you the better of both worlds, but obviously cost a lot. For example, if you have 4 250 gig hard drives, in RAID 0+1 your computer would only see 1 500 GIG drive, the other 2 disks are mirrored of the other 2. So you have speed, reliabilty, and extra storage.

Read more @ RAID - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia