Advice

[JimBob]

I'm buying a new hard drive this friday, i'm leaning towards this:
MAXTOR 120GB, 7200RPM, "2MB" CACHE, ATA-133 for £57.
What is the difference between IDE and SATA? What are the benefits?
Also the above HD also comes in the form of 8MB cache for £1.50 more.. May
aswell bag that baby instead?

 

[Nomen Nescio]

I'm buying a new hard drive this friday, i'm leaning towards this:
MAXTOR 120GB, 7200RPM, "2MB" CACHE, ATA-133 for £57.
What is the difference between IDE and SATA? What are the benefits?

No difference. SATA is IDE. What you really mean to ask is what is the
difference between PATA and SATA. Right now, the only difference is that
you get a nice skinny cable for SATA while PATA uses a wide ribbon
cable. That in itself was enough for me to switch, along with having a
MB that supported SATA. Considering that most of the current SATA drives
barely go past UDMA-66 in terms of performance, the additional bandwidth
of SATA is wasted. It's like pissing in a pipe 3 feet in diameter.

Also the above HD also comes in the form of 8MB cache for £1.50 more..

The extra cache will increase performance. But frankly, cannot recommend
Maxtor drives. They are cheap for a reason. They fail a lot! Go with
WD (although they have a history of getting noisy over time, with the
exception of their Raptor line). Or get a Seagate. Maxtor? Yuck!
Blech!