[Charged_GBH]

I have just purchased a 300 gigabyte Western Digital IDE hard drive to add on to my 120 gigabyte western digital SATA drive. i guess my main question is.. is there anyway to have an IDE AND SATA drive in the same computer? i dont want to open to IDE hard drive to find that i cant.. cuz then i cannot take it back

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If your motherboard has ports for both you can use both. You don't want to share an IDE cable with anything for optimal performance if you put a HD on it, so keep that in mind. You may be using yours for your CDROM ect... If you have SATA stick with that.

Edited by GeneralAres, 02 August 2005 - 09:28 PM.

[GeneralAres]

If your motherboard has ports for both you can use both. You don't want to share an IDE cable with anything for optimal performance if you put a HD on it, so keep that in mind. You may be using yours for your CDROM ect... If you have SATA stick with that.

Edited by GeneralAres, 02 August 2005 - 09:28 PM.

[Charged_GBH]

so your saying they will both work together but i should try to use both SATAs?

[GeneralAres]

They can work together IF you have an extra IDE port on the Mainboard that is not in use. But yes I recommend that if you already have an SATA HD that it is better in the long run to use another SATA drive.

[Charged_GBH]

ah alright thank you very much for the help.. i figured sata was better because of the bigger buffer. thank you very much

[GeneralAres]

SATA is better for numerous reasons, including longer cable length, faster "theoretical" transfer rates, hot swapping and every drive having a dedicated cable. For performance right now, a similiarly speced drive will perform about the same on both interfaces. In the future newer drives will only run at their fullest potential on SATA due to the larger bandwidth.

When buying a HD get the fastest RPM and largest onboard cache you can get. 10,000 RPM is better then 7200 RPM and 16MB is better then an 8MB Cache. Those will effect performance the most right now. Getting the drive on SATA is really for convience and the features I mentioned.