IDE - ATA

  • Thread starter Thread starter Stevie Ferris
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Stevie Ferris

Im thinking of adding another HDD to my computer but my current drive is
IDE. If I buy a ATA drive (seem very cheap) can this be easily installed.
And if so what additional cards or cables will I need?

Steve
 
Stevie Ferris said:
Im thinking of adding another HDD to my computer but my current drive is
IDE. If I buy a ATA drive (seem very cheap) can this be easily installed.
And if so what additional cards or cables will I need?

There are 2 connection types for hard disks now - EIDE (ATA) and SATA
(Serial ATA). The newer SATA has a different data cable connection and
requires different power connectors and a SATA controller on your
motherboard. However, you sound like you are talking about an older machine
which has run out of hard disk space, so the chances are that you have an
EIDE controller which will support EIDE ATA disks. If your PC is really old
there might be a size limit (8GB or 137GB for example) on the drive you can
use - through the years various limits have been set, reached then
developments made to break them, so you might have to upgrade your BIOS
(free download normally) in order to use all of a large disk. If you supply
us with a bit more information about the computer you have and what drives
your are considering we can advise.

If you only have 1 hard disk in your PC at the moment, then you should not
need any extra cables - each EIDE cable has 2 connectors for hard disks
(called 'master' and 'slave'). Again, you should have a spare 4 pin HD power
socket in the PC as well. Hopefully you should be able to simply fit a new
drive into the case, plug it in, then let Windows XP configure and format it
for you.
 
From: "Stevie Ferris" (e-mail address removed)
Date: 11/02/2004 10:08 AM Eastern Standard Time
Message-id: <[email protected]>

Im thinking of adding another HDD to my computer but my current drive is
IDE. If I buy a ATA drive (seem very cheap) can this be easily installed.
And if so what additional cards or cables will I need?

Steve

IDE and ATA are the same thing.
 
Thanx for the advice.
My computer is only about 2-3 years old with a Gigabyte GA-7VTXE (VIA KT266A
AGPset) Motherboard + AMD Athlon 1.4G processor . I was thinking of getting
a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9160G SATA150 HDD. Would I only need a sata
controller and cable (after upgrading the bios), and could I still keep my
old 40G IDE HDD.

Steve
 
Stevie Ferris said:
Thanx for the advice.
My computer is only about 2-3 years old with a Gigabyte GA-7VTXE (VIA
KT266A
AGPset) Motherboard + AMD Athlon 1.4G processor . I was thinking of
getting
a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9160G SATA150 HDD. Would I only need a sata
controller and cable (after upgrading the bios), and could I still keep my
old 40G IDE HDD.

Steve

Yes. I did the same thing as you, just got a cheap SATA contoller, it came
with cable, connected it all up, formatted the new drive in windows and that
was it. I never needed to do anything to the bios. I could still use all my
other hard drives.

Paul
 
Thanx for the advice.
My computer is only about 2-3 years old with a Gigabyte GA-7VTXE (VIA KT266A
AGPset) Motherboard + AMD Athlon 1.4G processor . I was thinking of getting
a Maxtor Diamondmax Plus 9160G SATA150 HDD. Would I only need a sata
controller and cable (after upgrading the bios), and could I still keep my
old 40G IDE HDD.

Steve

You should buy an ATA133 drive, not SATA. An SATA drive
will be SLOWER on your board because of your need to add an
SATA PCI card to run it, and that also makes it more
expensive.

Your motherboard probably supports 160GB drives but you
might check on a bios update for it, just in case it
doesn't.
 
I would agree with the general opinion here - don't bother getting a PCI
controller for SATA drives - just get another EIDE (ATA) drive - they are
the same price and the performance is excellent. SATA technology has the
potential to be much faster than EIDE (ATA) drive technology, but the drives
themselves perform just the same at the moment - its just a different
connector.

You should be able to connect up to 4 devices on your current EIDE
motherboard controller - there is a primary and secondary channel and each
channel can take a master and slave device, so 3 hard disks + DVD drive or 2
hard disks + DVD + CD writer are all feasible.
 
Stevie Ferris said:
Im thinking of adding another HDD to my computer but my current drive is
IDE. If I buy a ATA drive (seem very cheap) can this be easily installed.
And if so what additional cards or cables will I need?

Steve

Yes IDE is the same as ATA

You may also read about DMA or UDMA or UIDE

it is all based on the same connector to the board (big grey ribbon cables)

they are all in most cases backward compatable, the only incompatability
between hard drives in todays market are

SCSI hard drives and Serial-ATA or SATA

it would be best to purchase either one of the below

IDE
UIDE
UDMA
ATA100
ATA133

they should all work no problem on your board


buying a SATA drive would not only mean purchasing a PCI card Controller,
but would also mean purchasing a new PSU (i believe) seen as SATA drives
take a different connection for power (i just recently got a new PSU with
them on) they are smaller and thinner than the big white 4 pin connectors on
most ATX Power Supplies

best option, just get a mid range ATA/UDMA/IDE/UIDE/DMA 80 GB maxtor (about
£40 or $60)

i believe getting a PCI SATA controller would limit the speed of the drive
as it would running on the PCI bus

which a standard 32bit PCI bus runs at 33Mhz and has a bandwidth of 130 MBps

where as SATA harddrives allow bandwidth of typically 150 MBps (larger than
the PCI bus) later versions of SATA (i dont know if they have been
implimented yet?) are said to be able to support 300 MBps and later 600 MBps

IDE or ATA on the other hand allows bandwidth of theoretically 133 MBps

that being ATA133
and you guessed it ATA100 theoretically allows a bandwidth of 100 MBps (so
it isnt a great huge difference from the lowest bandwidth SATA)


read this to go into it in detail


http://www.pugetsystems.com/articles.php?id=6
 
Christo said:
best option, just get a mid range ATA/UDMA/IDE/UIDE/DMA 80 GB maxtor
(about £40 or $60)

If you want it to fail in a year or two!! If you would like it to last a bit
longer, choose another manufacturer - Samsung or Western Digital for
example. Same sort of price tho. Samsung Spinpoint drives are very quiet if
that is of interest!

My original 2 850MB western digital hard drives are still working. My third
hard disk - 1.7GB Fujitsu hard drive is still working. I then got a 6.4GB
Western Digital and it is still going. My 10GB IBM drive is fine. My Maxtor
60GB drive failed after about a year. It was replaced under warranty, but
not without hassle and obviously some lost data - I do regular backups but
you always loose some recent work. My Samsung 160GB drive is still going
strong (about 12-18 months old). In my experience with computer over the
last decade or so, all of the hard disks that I have seen fail (quite a
few!) have been IBM or Maxtor drives. I think they are the same technology
under the covers (and some even share the same covers!)

Generally speaking, the faster the drive spins and the more cache it has,
the faster it will perform. There are exceptions to this rule (Samsung
spinpoint for example only spin at 5400).
 
Gareth Tuckwell said:
If you want it to fail in a year or two!! If you would like it to last a bit
longer, choose another manufacturer - Samsung or Western Digital for
example. Same sort of price tho. Samsung Spinpoint drives are very quiet if
that is of interest!

My original 2 850MB western digital hard drives are still working. My third
hard disk - 1.7GB Fujitsu hard drive is still working. I then got a 6.4GB
Western Digital and it is still going. My 10GB IBM drive is fine. My Maxtor
60GB drive failed after about a year. It was replaced under warranty, but
not without hassle and obviously some lost data - I do regular backups but
you always loose some recent work. My Samsung 160GB drive is still going
strong (about 12-18 months old). In my experience with computer over the
last decade or so, all of the hard disks that I have seen fail (quite a
few!) have been IBM or Maxtor drives. I think they are the same technology
under the covers (and some even share the same covers!)

Generally speaking, the faster the drive spins and the more cache it has,
the faster it will perform. There are exceptions to this rule (Samsung
spinpoint for example only spin at 5400).

Everyone seems to have stories like these. I had a WD drive fail just after
a year's use. Whilst my IBM, Fujitsu, and Maxtor are all working after
several years.
 
Everyone seems to have stories like these. I had a WD drive fail just after
a year's use. Whilst my IBM, Fujitsu, and Maxtor are all working after
several years.

I'm a fan of Maxtor drives in general -- I've had a couple fail over the
years, but I don't treat them well so I don't hold it against them. The
ones that failed were never mounted, one of which was swinging loose in
the system.

That being said, I've started buying WD drives since they come with 3-5
year warranties, whereas the similarly priced Maxtor drives only have a
1 year warranty.

In general I don't bother with warranties, I just replace the part (I
usually do ship the defective unit back at some point, when I get a
replacement I usually end up selling it or giving it away), but to me,
it says something if a manufacturer will stand behind their product for
3-5 years.
 
Gareth Tuckwell said:
If you want it to fail in a year or two!! If you would like it to last a
bit longer, choose another manufacturer - Samsung or Western Digital for
example. Same sort of price tho. Samsung Spinpoint drives are very quiet
if that is of interest!

My original 2 850MB western digital hard drives are still working. My
third hard disk - 1.7GB Fujitsu hard drive is still working. I then got a
6.4GB Western Digital and it is still going. My 10GB IBM drive is fine. My
Maxtor 60GB drive failed after about a year. It was replaced under
warranty, but not without hassle and obviously some lost data - I do
regular backups but you always loose some recent work. My Samsung 160GB
drive is still going strong (about 12-18 months old). In my experience
with computer over the last decade or so, all of the hard disks that I
have seen fail (quite a few!) have been IBM or Maxtor drives. I think they
are the same technology under the covers (and some even share the same
covers!)

Generally speaking, the faster the drive spins and the more cache it has,
the faster it will perform. There are exceptions to this rule (Samsung
spinpoint for example only spin at 5400).

with hard drive cooling becoming an issue these days it is simple to pick up
a cheap coolermaster3 hard drive cooler for about £25 or $40 that can make a
huge difference in the lifespan of hard disks

I am on my first maxtor, it is 2nd hand and i haven't really had many
problems with it. However in the past I have had trouble with samsung hard
drives (old 6GB ones, Kept failing) other than that i haven't had too many
hard drives fail, had a fujitsu 80GB and a un named model 80 GB in my last
system last a while with a coolermaster3 on the fujitsu. since been sold on.
 
[snip]
SATA technology has the
potential to be much faster than EIDE (ATA) drive technology
[snip]

Currently the speeds are 133 MB/s for IDE and 150 MB/s for SATA. I don't
know any drive that reached these speeds (two IDE disks on the same channel
might just come close, thats where the second channel is for).

- Joris
 
[snip]
buying a SATA drive would not only mean purchasing a PCI card Controller,
but would also mean purchasing a new PSU (i believe) seen as SATA drives
take a different connection for power (i just recently got a new PSU with
them on) they are smaller and thinner than the big white 4 pin connectors on
most ATX Power Supplies
[snip]

I only know PSUs with those 4-pin connectors that fit nicely in any SATA
disk I know. This will probably be the case for the time to come.

On a new computer there was a cable that converted the standard 4 pin power
connector into 2 new SATA power connectors. I used that one because I had
the cable available and you don't lose it when it's in the computer.

You don't need a new PSU just for SATA.

- Joris
 
In message <[email protected]> "Joris
Dobbelsteen said:
[snip]
SATA technology has the
potential to be much faster than EIDE (ATA) drive technology
[snip]

Currently the speeds are 133 MB/s for IDE and 150 MB/s for SATA. I don't
know any drive that reached these speeds (two IDE disks on the same channel
might just come close, thats where the second channel is for).

WD Raptors can do ~77MB/s sustained. Burst speeds are much higher,
especially if the data is being cached by the drive.
 
Joris Dobbelsteen said:
[snip]
buying a SATA drive would not only mean purchasing a PCI card Controller,
but would also mean purchasing a new PSU (i believe) seen as SATA drives
take a different connection for power (i just recently got a new PSU with
them on) they are smaller and thinner than the big white 4 pin connectors on
most ATX Power Supplies
[snip]

I only know PSUs with those 4-pin connectors that fit nicely in any SATA
disk I know. This will probably be the case for the time to come.

On a new computer there was a cable that converted the standard 4 pin
power
connector into 2 new SATA power connectors. I used that one because I had
the cable available and you don't lose it when it's in the computer.

You don't need a new PSU just for SATA.

- Joris

sweet this must mean my PSU is super high tech then, there are two SATA
connectors coming from along with a few 4 pin connectors
 
sweet this must mean my PSU is super high tech then, there are two SATA
connectors coming from along with a few 4 pin connectors

Simply means it's a newer generation, good and junk PSU
alike are shipping with SATA connectors.
 
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