Hard drives, what is the difference?

[firezone2k]

Hello! So I am looking at buying a new hard drive for either my or my boyfriends computer so that we can put one of our old hard drives in my sons computer (he needs more space). I have been out of the loop for awhile on new hardware so I am so lost at the moment. I see lots of drives labeled: EIDE Ultra-ATA / 133 or EIDE Ultra-ATA/ 100 which is great but I have no clue what that means. The most I can find online is that the motherboard must be compatable with these drives for them to function properly. K that's fine and all but for the life of me I can't find anything about the motherboards that we have that says if they will work with these drives or not. Both of the motherboards we have are SuperMicro P6SBA. The hard drives that we currently have are marked as UDMA ATA-133 and work like a dream. Do I need to stick with the UDMA ATA-133 drives or will the Ultra-ATA/ 133 (100) drives work?

 

[Elif Tymes]

As long as its IDE, and ATA, it should work fine.

 

[Sleepy_Steve]

welcome to the forums...

the ultra ATA type is reverse compatable so no worries it should work fine with your/BF/son's systems, so long as they do not say SATA... then thats another can of worms entireley. (sp i know)

on the other hand, why dont you tell us the size and prefomance you are looking for, if we know this, we can give sugestion on what are good buys for you.

personaly i would go for something like this:
RPMs: 7200
Chache: 8MB
Size: 160GB is a good trade off of $ per GB (imho)
Interface: you just have to avoid the SATA, you will not support this. however the drives you mentioned before are just fine... they are reverse compatable, and just fine with the old interface *crosses fingers* ( im not sure, wait and see of someone agrees with me on this) meaning that all the drives you see labled: EIDE Ultra-ATA / 133 or EIDE Ultra-ATA/ 100, are fine candidates to chose from imo.

 

[facialicious]

sata drives are really nice if your board has the plugs for em. It sounds like your systems are a little older so they probably dont.

ATA100 and ATA133 refer to transfer rates. Maxtor came out with the ATA133, but its only really theoretically faster than the ATA100. It may not really be much faster for you. Sleepy Steve is right that 99% of the time they are backwards compatible. I would just stick with Western Digital or Maxtor and get ATA100 or 133, 7200RPM, 8MB cache. The size is up to you.

I would also get it at newegg cuz their prices are very competitive and if the drive doesnt work out they have excellent customer service.

 

[Rafjr00]

A good run down of the acronims:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/if/ide/modesUDMA-c.html

Get any hard drive that is in your price range as long as it is not a SATA drive or SCSI drive.