[p-zero]

So heres the deal I have an older dell dimension 8100 P4 1.5ghz with 256 rdram (1024 is on the way), as I was installing my new video card and some new games (COD2,BF2) I noticed that I am running out of room on my good ol 40 gig HD. So heres my question - What should I get? I know its an IDE drive but can I put in ANY ide drive? Or does it have to be specific as in ATA, or OEM? I know I have to reflash my BIOS if I go any bigger than 120gig, I was thinkin of getting a seagate 300gig 16mb 7200 IDE/ATA. Would this be a good hard drive? WIll it work? ANy suggestions as to what kind or brand to get would be a big help. Also is the 16mb cache really worth the extra money over the 8mb? Thanx in advance,
-Pete.

[Advertisements]

Your playing those with a 1.5 P4 and 256 of ram, i would probably just save up for a new pc, that way you can get SATA drives, if you want to get that one you have to get the right speed, so your mobo might only support ATA100 and most drives will be ATA133 thats just an example youll have to look it up googles the best bet.

[warriorscot]

Your playing those with a 1.5 P4 and 256 of ram, i would probably just save up for a new pc, that way you can get SATA drives, if you want to get that one you have to get the right speed, so your mobo might only support ATA100 and most drives will be ATA133 thats just an example youll have to look it up googles the best bet.

[Neil Jones]

ATA133 was a Maxtor initiative. IT's why you only ever see Maxtor drives run at UDMA6/ATA133 and every other drive caps out only at ATA100. Pretty much any board that can go at ATA100 can also do it at ATA133, though the speed increase is nothing to write home about.

Anyway, for the original poster, any IDE drive will do, you may find that your board can actually work hard drives bigger than 137Gb, though I'm not suggesting you buy a 300Gb one just to test this theory.

If you can borrow a 160Gb IDE drive from a friend and hang it off your computer, then if your computer can see 160Gb, it'll have no issues with 300Gb as the next limit after 137Gb is... in theory 2048Gb. But as that's at least four years away from even being approached, its nothing to worry about. Yet.

[p-zero]

Scot, believe it or not I run COD2 and BF2 on the medium settings with a pretty good frame rate. As for the ram it has 256 at the moment, I just bought 2 new kingston 512 ram chips, as I have to replace them in pairs, they should be here any time. So then Ill have 1280.
Neil, I posted on the Dell website about the same topic but didnt get the answer I was lookin for except that if I want to run anything larger than a 120Gb I need to re-flash my BIOS to A09.
But thanx, youve answered my question I think I will get that Seagate HD as its relatively cheap.
-Pete.