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