[scottportraits]

Sept 8, 2007

Hi,

I need to buy an internal hard drive for an external casing. I know it takes enhanced IDE, but am not sure what ATA/100 versus ATA/133 means. Will both fit ? Is one faster, better, etc ....

....Also, I should back-up data on DVD's, which seem to take about 4.5GB of info, but I heard somewhere that some DVD's have two layers and you can get TWICE as much on one DVD. I have a stack of DVD-R's.....will they work ?? How do you know which ones will do this, and do you need a more fancy DVD burner than I have, or is it in the software you use to burn DVD's ??

- scottportraits

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Hi scottportraits!

ATA/100 and ATA/133 are your transfer speeds, so an ATA/133 will be faster. Other than that, they are both the same - so it will fit.

The DVD's you are talking about are called "Dual Layer" and you need to have "Dual Layer" DVD's and a Dual Layer-capable DVD burner to use this.

Cheers

[Troy]

Hi scottportraits!

ATA/100 and ATA/133 are your transfer speeds, so an ATA/133 will be faster. Other than that, they are both the same - so it will fit.

The DVD's you are talking about are called "Dual Layer" and you need to have "Dual Layer" DVD's and a Dual Layer-capable DVD burner to use this.

Cheers

[Neil Jones]

ATA-133 was a Maxtor idea and therefore only Maxtor drives run at ATA-133 speeds. Every other brand only runs at ATA-100.
Having said that, in theory ATA-133 should be faster, but in reality its a maximum throughput which not even ATA-100 can reach so there's no chance ATA-133 is going to be any faster. I don't believe there is any speed benefit between ATA-100 and ATA-133, and even if there is, its not going to set the world on fire.

[scottportraits]

Sept 9, 2007

Thanks Neil and FPVD.....

I wonder why they use some terms interchangeably, which can cause confusion. For example....

....The external hard drive enclosure I used and will be using specifies "Enhanced IDE" interface, sometimes stated in the ads as 'EIDE', etc. Why do they also call it ATA or PATA also, without saying IDE or whatever.....I imagine PATA means parallel ATA - the same as IDE, or what ? I can be a bit confusing, I wish they'd standardize on terms like this.

I know SATA is a different type of plug and won't work, serial ATA, I guess.....but is there any great difference between IDE, EIDE, and PATA ? My last Western Digital 250GB HD broke on me and it was a disaster of immense proportion....now I want to replace it and wonder if Western Digital Caviars are cheap-o or if there is much difference betwen brands like Seagate, Maxtor, Samsung, etc.

I know now you still have to back up important data onto data disks like DVD's, since hard drives are not as permanent and reliable as I once thought.

Thanks again for the clarifications, they are sorely needed thru-out the PC hardware industry.

- Your student,

-scottportraits

[Samm]

Hi there

I'm just going to step in here quickly with a personal recommendation...

Re. hard drive manufacturers - I recommend Seagate for 2 reasons. 1) Their drives (in my experience) tend to be very reliable, long lasting & generally very good quality, especially given that they cost more or less the same as most other brands (ie Maxtor/WD/Samsung etc). 2) As far as I'm aware, they are the only manufacturer out of the ones I've just listed that offer a 5 year warranty on all their internal hard drives (IDE & SATA).

As for differences between IDE/EIDE/PATA - They are essentially all the same. IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) was the first standard of its type, based on a 16 bit bus. EIDE (Enhanced IDE) came after & is a faster version of the IDE standard. It uses 28 bit LBA addressing & provided native support for drives larger than 528MB.

DMA (direct memory access) is the4 method by which a drive communicates with the rest of the system. UDMA (Ultra DMA) modes determine the data transfer speed of drives. For example. UDMA mode 2 allows a data transfer speed of 33MBps. This is also known as ATA-33. UDMA mode 5 = 100MBps (aka ATA100) & UDMA mode 6 = 133MBps (aka ATA133).

The term PATA stands for Parallel ATA & has only really been in common use since the advent of SATA drives. PATA is just another way of referring to an EIDE or ATA drive. The 'P' or Parallel was added to distinguish it from the SATA interface & hence avoid confusion.

[scottportraits]

Sept 11, 2007

Hi Samm,

Thanks for the info clarifying the confusion between SATA, PATA, EIDA, and IDE. Like I said, I wish there was some system whereby the manufacturers would stick to standardized, uniform terms. That way there'd be no confusion about differences between PATA and IDE when you look on the spec sheet and see one or the other is given under 'interface'. Or if your existing plugs will fit for IDE, EIDE, PATA, or SATA......
.....then there's all the numbers they use....100/133; ATA-33 and ATA133; etc etc

For us little guys there can be a lot of confusion in the hardware world, and sometimes something won't work after you buy it, you know ??

So I'll try to get a Seagate with enhanced (EIDE) interface, whether it says PATA or not. Enhanced IDE is faster than regular IDE.

Thanks for this info, I hope a Seagate will work okay with the two Western Digital master and slave hard drives that are already inside the PC.

'Bye until next time,

-scottportraits

[Samm]

Hi scottportraits

Glad you found the info useful. You shouldn't have any problems with adding a Seagate drive to 2 existing WD drives.

I gather from your first post that you intend to use the Seagate drive in an external casing, right? If so, you may want to consider the following points :

If your external enclosure uses USB v2 (and assuming your PC supports USB v2 obviously) then you wouldn't get any benefit from placing an ATA-133 drive (Maxtor only) rather than an ATA-100 drive in the enclosure. Reason is that the maximum (theoretical) data transfer speed of USB v2 is only 60MBps. In practice, this will be slower again - probably around half of that at most. In other words, the data transfer speed of the USB port is slower than that of the PATA interface anyway.

Given the above fact, if you wish to increase the performance of the external drive, then get a drive with a large cache (eg 8MB or 16MB). Nearly all new PATA drives now will operate at 7,200rpm which is obviously faster than the older 5400rpm drives. However, as a result, they run hotter. If you're going to place the drive in an enclosure, then I would recommend you use an enclosure which has at least one fan built into it.