Hard drives dvd drives
Hard drives and DVD drives
Ide , ultra ata, sata and the rest
HOW TO BUY
If you’re building a high-performance system, buy the fastest drive you can afford; if you just want lots of capacity then slower drives offer better value.
OEM or ‘brown box’ drives are cheaper - this is the bare drive without the extras, such as cables, included in retail boxed versions.
The transfer rates in today’s Ultra ATA drives are 100Mbytes/sec (133Mbytes/sec for Maxtor drives), while Serial ATA (Sata) drives are rated at 150Mbytes/sec. Check the seek times, spindle speed, buffer size and the real density of the platters (disks).Thsi is a major thing to remember when you build a desktop computer.
Usually in milliseconds, seek time is how long a drive’s heads take to find data on the disk. The speed at which the spindle holding the disks spins ranges from 4,200rpm for a notebook drive to 15,000rpm for some SCSI drives. Generally, faster speeds give better performance.
The larger the buffer (cache), the more recently written or stored data is held in the drive’s memory, resulting in less time seeking the data on the disk.
Areal density is the amount of data stored on a given area of a drive’s platter. The more data per square centimetre (gigabytes per platter), the less disk movement is required to bring it under the heads.
Originally Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), then Enhanced IDE (E-IDE), this common parallel interface is usually written as ATA (AT Attachment), modified with speed improvements in recent years to Ultra ATA/xxx, where xxx is the peak bandwidth in Mbytes/sec. To differentiate Ultra ATA from Sata, the term Parallel ATA is used.
Faster Sata drives are more expensive than Parallel ATA. Sata uses two pairs of high-frequency cables, working at low voltage.
SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) drives are technically no different to ATA drives, but support up to 16 devices on a single channel and you can have multiple channels in a PC. The disadvantage, though, is price.
Most motherboards support Raid (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), which connects multiple drives, to improve performance or provide fault tolerance.
One problem you may hit is the inability to access the new drive’s full capacity. Some older Bioses only support drives up to 137GB. This may be solved by updating the PC’s Bios. Retail boxed disks often come with software to fool the Bios into recognising the disk, or you can buy a separate disk controller card, which fits into a PCI slot.Always to remember to have such an option when you build a desktop computer yourself.
