[dyermaker610]

Hello all!

I have two 60 gb 7200 WDs

and I'm looking to swapping one of them for a SATA drive when I get my new motherboard.

Since I haven't played w/ the new HD's can someone give me a run down w/ the differences between RAID, serial ATA vs the IDE (besides being faster)

Here's a couple of questions,

SATA converters, what will this do to my 60 gb IDE? if anything at all?

Cache, 2mb/8mb.. what performance gain?

IDE ULTRA ATA133 vs IDE ULTRA ATA100 what performance gain?

best quality AND price brands?

brands I should stay away from?

8.9/9.5/10 ms seek time differences in EIDE?

If anyone could answer one or some of these questions please do so =)

Thanks.

[Deathknight]

Hrm I will try and answer some of these for ya.

First off for raid thats a topic that you could write a small novel on This is a link to a nice site that gives a whole bunch of info on raid (maybe more than you wanted )

http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/index.htm

As for IDE and SATA well there isn't a whole lot different between them yet, aside from the snazy SATA cables. As far as performance is concerned SATA in itself doesn't offer a huge bump up in performance over ATA, at least not in its present state.

If your motherboard has onboard SATA RAID and you think you want to use it then a SATA converter would be helpful, since you could use your existing drives with it.

As for Cache well I find that 8mb cache provides a pretty nice bump up in performance. How much performance increase you see probably depends on how you use your machine.

Seek times are a huge deal IMHO. The western digital raptor for instance is a 10k rpm drive with a 5.2ms seek time. There is a very noticeable speed difference over say the 120gb 8mb cache 8.9 ms seek time western digital drives in my other rig(very fast drives in their own right).