best buy's seagate 120 GB hard drive

I saw a 250GB at like $100 for an ATA/133 from WD...I think I'll go with this soon...
 
civicrocker7 said:
i just bought a 200GB harddrive from staples it was a early bird speacial and i only paid 30 for it
and its a ATA/133 its made by maxtor so im pretty happy with it

nice! :p the stock hard drive in my dell is a maxtor 20 GB

also, in the instructions it recommends replacing the cable connecting the hard drive to the motherboard; i forgot to do that, although I have the cable. they recommend doing so because some cables can't handle the speed of the new hard drive or something like that if..if its already working, that means i dont need to replace it right?

thanks.
 
ATA/100 is pretty good considering you paid $30 for it. Becides, it's still good technology that works well, even if Serial ATA is slowly phasing it out.
 
what do ATA/100 and ATA/133 refer to?

and one other question; how do external USB hard drives compare with internal hard drives in speed?
 
They are the speed at which data are transferred. ATA100 means it's suppose to transfer data @ 100MB/s (theoritically), but you're in fact transferring at around 50 MB/Sec. Even if you buy an ATA100 or 133 controller card, you might want to know that the PCI bus itself only handles about 100 MB/s and there is lots of other data flowing through it. So 133 means nothing there.

As for the internal/external USB drives, I look at it like this. Anything inside is directly attached to the motherboard for maximum speeds. WIth an external drive, you have a cable you have to plug into. There may be some delay or latency there, but not significant. You'll probably never feel the difference in speed anyways. I would prefer the internal hard drive, but there are cases in which external hard drives are super neat to have. I love to get one for portability.
 
ATA/100/133 is bascially IDE.

Internal hard drives are way faster than USB or FireWire. Only use an external HDD for storage, archives or back-ups etc.
 
TRDCorolla said:
They are the speed at which data are transferred. ATA100 means it's suppose to transfer data @ 100MB/s (theoritically), but you're in fact transferring at around 50 MB/Sec. Even if you buy an ATA100 or 133 controller card, you might want to know that the PCI bus itself only handles about 100 MB/s and there is lots of other data flowing through it. So 133 means nothing there.

As for the internal/external USB drives, I look at it like this. Anything inside is directly attached to the motherboard for maximum speeds. WIth an external drive, you have a cable you have to plug into. There may be some delay or latency there, but not significant. You'll probably never feel the difference in speed anyways. I would prefer the internal hard drive, but there are cases in which external hard drives are super neat to have. I love to get one for portability.


So an ATA/133 can theoretically transfer data at 133 mbps?
 
Yeah, the drive was made for it, but other factors play a role in it too like the OS itself, and if you have a PCI controller.
 
TRDCorolla said:
Yeah, the drive was made for it, but other factors play a role in it too like the OS itself, and if you have a PCI controller.

Ah, i see. Thanks. The original Maxtor 20 GB that's the boot drive in my Dell is probably an ATA/100 as well, right? I bought the dell about 3 or 4 years ago.
 
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