hi a;;


i have to get hold of a 160 gb or 250 gb HDD by saturday........
and right now i cant search the THG forums for the question i am going to ask; so if dis has awready been ask please dont bang me...
okay so ......what should i go for....sata 1 or sata2.....????/
i have heard that sata 2 gives the speed of sata 1 on many systems....is dat true???if its true how can i get the normal speed of sata 2 i.e.300MB/sec..??????
and i have a 40 GB WD IDE HDD already...will i be able to use it alongwith the new one????i am sure that i can but asked just for safety's sake.. :?
and finally which brand should i go for.....WD or seagate or samsung??????
any help will be greatly appreciated....
and my system specs are listed below...if u want anything else do lemme know


my system specs:
intel d101ggc MOBO
p4 2.8 GHz proc.
msi geforce 7300 gt ddr2
1 GB ddr RAM

If you can get sata 2 for roughly the same price then go for it. Overall you wont see that much of a difference between them.

You can use IDE and Sata together

Take your pick as far as brand. I have had good luck with WD. Seagate is just fine along with samsung.

I know that you asked for a 160 or 250 GB hard drive, but take a look at this for only $95 or so...

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] 6822148215

And Newegg is wonderful to do business with, especially if you need it rushed to you or have to return the product.

This seems to be one of the most popular drives right now. I have one and wouldn't hesistate to recommend it to others.

Don't worry too much about SATA 1 versus SATA 2. The theoretical transfer speed of the "older" SATA 1 is rarely max'd out by any drive(s), except maybe some fast RAID combinations (which you probably will never be using). And I doubt that the price difference between SATA 1 and SATA 2 is noticeable.

They are like highways rated for 150 MPH and 300 MPH. While there are a few vehicles that can approach those speeds, most never will take advantage of the potential of each...at least nowadays.

I think that you may only achieve SATA 1 speeds on a SATA 2 under certain conditions which depend on the hard drive and motherboard...or something to that effect. But, the point is that you rarely will ever approach even the slower SATA 1 speed with your everyday hard disks anyway. Thus, you'll probably never be able to tell the difference.

Your PC must have an IDE connection and IDE cable in order to connect the older 40 GB IDE hard drive. This connection is independent of any SATA connection and uses a completely difference cable than the SATA connections to your new SATA hard drive. Thus, unless your motherboard is weird, if you have an IDE connection and two SATA connections, you will have no problem connecting one IDE hard drive and up to two SATA hard drives.

When you turn on your PC, it should detect and recognize the 40 GB drive on the IDE channel and your new SATA drive on the SATA channel. If it doesn't, go into the BIOS of your PC (hit F8 maybe when it is rebooting?) and change one or more of the options. It may be that the BIOS is set to deactivate the SATA channels or the IDE channel (who knows why).

I have a Dell 4600 with two SATA drives and an IDE drive. They work without any problems.

Oh, and make sure that the IDE drive, if it is the only drive connected to that IDE cable, is set to either CABLE SELECT or MASTER. If you have a CD-Rom drive attached to that same IDE cable too, then make sure that the CD-Rom is set to SLAVE and the IDE hard drive is set to MASTER.

The experts in this forum will correct any erroneous advice above. You may want to wait until they chime in before proceeding.

1) IDE/SATA/SATA2 choice does not matter mostly. SATA/SATA2 (SATA2 is mroe of a marketing term and not an official spec) ar eprobably good for forward compatibility, the best choice is the cheaper of the two. The speeds are theoretical maximums and cannot be achieved by todays hard drives. Most of the other "features" of the spec are garbage as far as single user systems are concerned.

I would go with WD or Seagate basd on price, I don't really trust samsung based one xperience (I have had pretty much every brand fail on me, but samsung with more frequency).

As far as the purchase itself, you may want to do it online or wait until the sunday circular with "deals". There tends to be a brand discounted every week at the major stores (BB, CC, CompUSA, Fry's).

Here's a good deal http://shop1.outpost.com/product/4799749 on a 400GB that is retail meaning you get all the cables, screws (unlike the OEM). You can probably find similar deals at Newegg and Zipzoomfly.

there is no such thing as a "SATA 2" or "SATA II" device
http://www.sata-io.org/namingguidelines.asp

To compare HD performance look at benchmarks such as THG's or look up others.

Differential serial interface with interlocking protocol that uses less power, generates less EMI, and is less suseptable to being affected by EMI with blind-mate capable plugs that don't use pins and cannot be plugged in backwards, smaller cables, more advanced interface-level power saving capablilities, jumperless configuration; these are all great reasons to get SATA instead of IDE. The interlocking protocol which allows alligns to be inserted into the data stream at any time instead of being forced to wait to ensure that each frame can be fully buffered can also increase performance even if the drive has identical seek and internal read/write speeds to an IDE drive.

SATA was created to for single-user systmes and most of it's features were designed with desktop and laptop computers in mind specifically.

thank you guys for the replies......i expected pretty much the same as what you all have told me....
and i live in India and therefore all the prices are skewed differently and moreover i dont have an option of online shopping as such....here what i can afford right now is a 250 GB HDD........but thanx for the replies nonetheless.....
now p;ease just tell me what brand should i go for?????? is there much differnce b/w the brands(i think there aint but i have to ask )...

I think I understand now that you are on a little bit of a budget and are more interested in capacity rather than performance and have limitied selection. In that case you really shouldn't worry about interface speed or NCQ at all and just pay attention to price/gigabyte and a little to price/performance.

In that case, a few general reccomendations:
Samsung Spinpoint P(such as the SP2504C 250gb)
Western Digital Caviar SE16 (such as the WD250KS 250gb)
Hitachi GST DeskStar (such as the HDT72252DLA380 250gb)

In the USA these drives all have good price/performance and price/gigabyte. If you look here you'll notice that there are the Western Digital Raptors, and then there is everything else at very close to the same performance levles (with 3gbps, NCQ, and even ATA 133 all over the spectrum, that's why I told you to look at benchmarks and not specs).

I own a couple Samsung Spinpoint drives and I haven't had any problems with them. The Caviar and DeskStar lines had bad reputations in the past, but I think they are better now (the spinpoint line doesn't have a past xD).