MGaz

thinking to finally move on to sata. can you recommend me a hard disk? been out the loop for a while now.

Also, what are cheapest versions of the fastest hard drives available? (in other words , the cheapest versions of the fastest drives?, if you get me)

cheers, gaz.

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Processor: 7.5
Memory: 7.7
Graphics: 7.2
Gaming Graphics: 7.2
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

[3DMARK Vantage: 9229] [3DMARK 06: 18365] [3DMARK 03: 46941] [3DMARK 2001 SE: 36059] [3DMARK 2000: 29438]

kris23

Seagate 7200.12 drives are really the fastest 7200RPM drives you can buy that dont cost much

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MGaz

is it worth upgrading to one of them coming from my maxtor 250 GB IDE with 16mb cache?

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Processor: 7.5
Memory: 7.7
Graphics: 7.2
Gaming Graphics: 7.2
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

[3DMARK Vantage: 9229] [3DMARK 06: 18365] [3DMARK 03: 46941] [3DMARK 2001 SE: 36059] [3DMARK 2000: 29438]

Tipstaff

Yes. The Seagate that kris mentioned in particular has 32mb of cache, and on top of that you get the benefits of SATAs data transfer speeds. With IDE (or PATA) your max transfer rate is 133MB/s, while the older SATA I is about 1.5Gbit/s (roughly 190MB/s.. but usually you will see about 150MB/s), and SATA II (the newer standard) being 3.5Gbit/s (roughly 450MB/s). As you can see there would be a significant increase in speed over your current IDE/PATA hard drive just because of how much data those drives can transfer.

Speaking of WD, if you want pure speed, WD have 2 series of fast SATA drives that might interest you. There is the Raptor X series (which are SATA I drives), and the newer Velociraptor (which are SATA II). These drives run at 10,000 RPM, so their access speeds are insanely fast. The drawback is that they tend to be a bit more to way more expensive than other drives, and they hold less compared to a similar drive at the same price point.

BTW, one thing with your board: if you use the SATA ports supplied by the nForce chipset (the ones labeled 1-4) you will be able to run the drives at SATA II. If you run the drives on the Silicon Image chip, the one that gives you 4 more SATA ports (labeled 5-8), their max is SATA I. Just remember that when, or if you use those connectors.

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Cow_160483

Tipstaff just about summed it all up

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Decode!
Muhahahahah!

Judas

alternatively...

Intels and OCZ's Solidstate Drives are expensive but crazy fast.

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Tipstaff

Same thing with G.Skills Falcon. It uses the same Indilinx controller as the OCZ Vertex, but seems to be a tad faster.

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AerieC

The WD Caviar Black HDs are also pretty good. They're a few dollars more than the Seagate 7200.12s, but they seem to have a bit lower failure rate as well. Performance is about even; the Seagate seems to be a bit faster in sequential read/write, whereas the Caviar is a little better in the random access tests. Also, the Caviar is louder (if that makes a difference to you). I know the 7200.11s had a really bad firmware issue that caused a lot of failures, but that should be fixed in the 7200.12s.

comp_ali

Where is the damn WD black drives , all I can see here for 1 TB are the slowly green ones . I remember using Maxtor and it was pretty good. should I give it a turn over WD this time.

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AerieC

Newegg has the Caviar Blacks in the 1TB flavor.

comp_ali

I don't mean the web stores . I am speaking of the local stores here in Egypt as the shipping costs crazy amount of money and even so there no shipping to at newegg .

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