TR Forums

i am trying to build my own pc and am wondering which is the best hard drive. What is the difference between uide and eide and the ata thing? comments welcome ...thanx

Buy a new one - if you're asking this sort of question you probably don't need more info than this

hmmm...which is the best hard drive to buy?i heard wd r good. is it worth paying extra for uide133?

This has already been discussed to death here.

Bruce

OK.
Lemme lay all the terminology down for you.
IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) and SCSI (Small Computer Standard Interface) are significantly different technological implementations for hard disk drives (HDDs) and other devices. In all likelyhood, you will be purchasing IDE. SCSI's much higher cost/megabyte ($$/MB) is really only justifieable in a high-end workstation or in a mission-critical server---running a Q3 server for your buds doesnt count.
UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) drives can access the main memory (RAM, or Random Access Memory) without passing the data thru the CPU (central processing unit); this speeds up data transfers & decreases the load on the processor. All new IDE HDDs should be UDMA capable. UDMA has several modes, UDMA2 is 33MB/s (MegaBytes per second), UDMA4 is 66MB/s. UDMA5 is 100MB/s, UDMA6 is 133MB/s. These are theoretical maximum peak transfer (burst) rates; real-world performance is typically 50MB/s burst and 30MB/s sustainable, at best.
ATA is Advanced Technology Attachment. Any IDE device that you can buy today uses parallel ATA, with a 40-pin ribbon cable. Ultra-ATA is an ATA device that is UDMA capable. An ATA-33 device would be UDMA2 capable, and would use a 40-pin, 40-wire cable. Anything ATA-66/UDMA4 or faster requires a 40-pin, 80-wire cable to achieve maximum performance; it will drop to UDMA2 if an 80-wire cable is not used.
The ATA 33/66/100/133 and UDMA 2/4/5/6 specs are not terribly important, as long as it is is ATA-66/UDMA4 or better.
Of greater importance are the spindle speeds and average seek time. Any high-performance IDE HDD will be 7200 RPMs (Revolutions Per Minute) for the spindle speed. Average (or Mean) seek time should be 10ms (milliseconds) or less. Also look at the HDDs cache, and on-disk RAM chip that stores small ammounts of frequently-accessed data, so that it can be returned to the system faster. 2MB minimum for good performance nowadays.

OK, now they you know the jargon, go hit the above link.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: lenzenm on 2002-03-01 16:19 ]</font>

xp 1800 cpu with heatsink and fan
512 ddr 266mhz ram
19inch ctx monitor
optical mouse and keyboard
phillips cdrw
pioneer dvd
geforce4 graphics card
soundblaster audigy with firewire sound card
dtt220 surround speakers

whch motherboard is best to use?
anyone see any problems?

Hmmm.
Well, if you want to go with a PCI-bus hogging Creative sound card, you should use a board that has a non-VIA southbridge (and thus non-VIA PCI bus). This means an AMD 761 north/766 south board (using an AMD 761/VIA 686B does not solve this problem), or an SiS 735, an nVidia nForce, or an (ugh) ALi Magic 1.
Forget the ALi, its' memeory performance is lousy. The AMD 761/766 boards are hard to find and pricy, not the best memroy throughput, but very stable. The SiS boards seem to be great performers, but the ECS K75A is the only easily available one, and it has only 2 DDR-DIMM slots (the other DIMM slots it has are for SDRAM) and reliability seems to be an issue with the ECS; about 1/10 are funky. This leaves the nForce, which seems to have decent performance and stability, but you would have to disable the integrated sound.
Perhaps a better solution would be to ditch the Audigy, so that you would have a wider range of motherboard options, including the VIA KT-266A or AMD761/VIA 686B hybird boards, which are great performers but have PCI issues.

I utilized an ABit KG7 (an AMD/VIA hybrid) for my most recent box, and am very happy with it. I was able to do so because I chose a Philips Acoustic Edge Dolby Digital 5.1 sound card, which does not have the issues with the VIA PCI implemetation that the Soundblaster products have.

The other issue is the CTX monitors. I have had very lousy ecxperiences with them. Poor reliability, sub-par image quality. Very curvy screen. Spend another $20-50 to get a Viewsonic or Samsung flatscreen. Or another $100 to get a monitor based on the Sony FD-Tritron tube (which can be Sonys, Mitsubishis, or third-party companies that buy the tubes from Sony & Mitsubishi.)

Other than those two things, everything looks great.

what about the abit kr7a or the asus asv266e?