Hard Drive Compatibility

  • Thread starter Thread starter TheScullster
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TheScullster

Hi all

I am confused by hard drive specs
How do I know if a hard drive of a given spec will work before I buy it?
I am thinking about:
Ultra DMA
ATA
Serial ATA
Don't know what it all means!
Does the motherboard hardware dictate the drive type that must be installed?
The motherboard is CUV4X-E Rev 1.05


TIA

Phil
 
Hi all

I am confused by hard drive specs
How do I know if a hard drive of a given spec will work before I buy it?
I am thinking about:
Ultra DMA
ATA
Serial ATA
Don't know what it all means!
Does the motherboard hardware dictate the drive type that must be installed?
The motherboard is CUV4X-E Rev 1.05


TIA

Phil
Click to expand...

HDs should be backwards compatible - meaning they wont operate at the
theretically max transfer rates if they were connected to a more
current controller but they should work.

All except the SATA HDs that use totally different connections. You
can buy SATA controller card and add them on though.

Not sure if you would have any of the gig limitation problems. I cant
remember if your board is that old or not. You will need SP1 I think
for WIN XP if you get a really large HD greated than 130 gigs or so I
think.
 
Hi all

I am confused by hard drive specs
How do I know if a hard drive of a given spec will work before I buy it?
I am thinking about:
Ultra DMA
ATA
Serial ATA
Don't know what it all means!
Does the motherboard hardware dictate the drive type that must be installed?
The motherboard is CUV4X-E Rev 1.05


TIA

Phil
Click to expand...

All the old style Parallel ATA drives (PATA, Ultra DMA, UDMA, UDMA33,
UDMA66, UDMA133, ATA33, ATA66, ATA133) are backwards compatible. That
means you may not get the full speed out of them if you use an older
controller, but they'll work.

The next gotcha would be the drive capacity. This only really becomes
an issue if you're buying a drive larger than 137GB and have an older
motherboard, or have an ancient 486 era machine (540MB limit). The
newer motherboards and controller cards should be able to deal with
drives larger than 137GB. If it turns out that you've got one of the
older ones that can only handle 137GB, don't worry, it will still
work. You just can't make partitions larger than 137GB without
installing some "overlay software". That's a driver that works around
the problem -- contact the manufacturer to get it.

Serial ATA (SATA) isn't exactly new, and it isn't rare, but it's new
enough that basically, if you have a motherboard that uses a SATA
controller, you probably know it. You can't use the older PATA style
drives without an adapter cable.
 
Hi all

I am confused by hard drive specs
How do I know if a hard drive of a given spec will work before I buy it?
I am thinking about:
Ultra DMA
ATA
Serial ATA
Don't know what it all means!
Does the motherboard hardware dictate the drive type that must be installed?
The motherboard is CUV4X-E Rev 1.05
Click to expand...


The board can use "UDMA" ATA, ATA100, ATA133 new drives. It
can't use SATA or SCSI without adding additional hardware, a
PCI controller card.

You might need a bios update from Asus to support drives
larger than 128GB.
 
Ultra DMA isn't a type of drive.It's a feature. ATA and IDE are both names for
IDE drives.
SerialATA is a new interface w/new much smaller cables and power connector.They
aren't much faster than the newest IDE drives yet.
You motherboard supports IDE. You could get a serial ATA add-on PCI card but
that's pointless unless your going to upgrade your motherboard soon.
The most important specs to look for are rotation speed(5400,7200 and 10,000
rpm) and cache size(2mb or 8mb).
For gaming a good 7200rpm drive with 8mb cache is fine.
 
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