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OT: Quick PC question - new big capacity hard drives

A transformer on the pole that serves mia casa popped last night and sure enough one of my hard drives booted with a SMART error warning me I'm on borrowed time. I was browsing the drives at New Egg and quickly discovered that things have changed since my last HD purchase. SATA drives seem to be the way to go (performance wise), but are not likely to port up with my 2002 Sony Vaio with its two (now one) EIDE drives, Ultra ATA/100 mumbo jumbo thingamajigs.

What's involved in installing a SATA in the way of adapters, cables and cost as opposed to just installing another EIDE drive? I'm looking at around $100 for a 250-300Gb replacement EIDE unit. Will a SATA drive knock heads with the existing/remaining EIDE drive - which thankfully is the master boot disk in my box - or will they co-exist in the same box? Is the SATA performance that much better - given the AutoCAD, ProE and Solidworks I'm usually screwing around with on my box?

This is the second large capacity WD drive this PC has toasted. The first one was on warranty, this one is on my dime and will be a Seagate - unless someone tells me their 5 yr warranty is BS.

OK - maybe not such a quick question after all, but that's the gist of it. Opinions?

TIA

WmB

Reply to
WmB
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Reply to
Ron Smith

newegg.com western digitals are excellent and hassle free. you must have an sata connector. does your mobo have them? they are skinny little things not like the 40 pin, (or 80) eide. most sata are also used on raid interfaces. the 2 coexist as long as the bios gives you boot choice.

Reply to
e

WmB wrote: : : What's involved in installing a SATA in the way of adapters, cables and cost : as opposed to just installing another EIDE drive? I'm looking at around $100 : for a 250-300Gb replacement EIDE unit. : How long do you intend to keep the unit? If you tend to chuck the unit for a shiney new one, then I'd say just go with a replacement parallel ATA (PATA) drive and be done with it.

If you plan to keep the unit, they it may be worth getting a serial ATA (SATA) drive.

For SATA, the bus and power connectors are completely different from PATA drives. That means that how easy it will be to switch depends on whether you power supply has SATA power connectors or not. If the answer is "no", you can get adapters that go from the standard 4 pin molnex to the 15 pin SATA for $5.00 or so.

If your mother board does not support SATA, you can get PCI cards that have SATA, but they will cost perhaps more than the drive. Promise seems to be okay, Highpoint seems to have been misnamed, from the comments I have seen. : : Will a SATA drive knock heads with : the existing/remaining EIDE drive - which thankfully is the master boot disk : in my box - or will they co-exist in the same box? : Should be fine. The controller should make it all look the same to your BIOS. : : Is the SATA performance : that much better - given the AutoCAD, ProE and Solidworks I'm usually : screwing around with on my box? : I have seen benchmarks claiming to be that way, but I don't trust them. Are you really comparing apples to apples in those benchmarks? I don't know that they are. On the other hand, it seems to be how the industry is moving. : : This is the second large capacity WD drive this PC has toasted. The first : one was on warranty, this one is on my dime and will be a Seagate - unless : someone tells me their 5 yr warranty is BS. : I have not trusted WD for quite some time. As for Seagate, I had some SCSI disks arrive with problems. Seagate RMA's the drives promptly. You should, however, verify the warrantee on Seagates web site - sometimes it is the vendor warrantee, so you have to deal with them.

Bruce

Reply to
Bruce Burden

I'd say mass file accessing operations that used to take hours on IDE drives that now take minutes is a pretty fair benchmark in the real world.

Reply to
Ron Smith

Thanks guys for all the info - I knew I could count on a quick & informed

411 from RMS. I'm going to take the path of least resistance and order an IDE drive and save the upgrade to SATA for a later date when this system needs to be replaced - probably inside of two years.

Of course by then they'll probably be using Terabyte drives and ASATA. ;-)

Thanks again to all that responded.

WmB

Reply to
WmB

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