EIDE harddrive compatibility (40pin/80pin)

A

ameerov

Hi, I currently have a PIII system with a Gigabyte GA-60XC motherboard
which has two ATA66 IDE connectors. Current harddrive is a WD 20GB.

I plan to get another hard drive, more specifically the Western Digital
Caviar SE 120 GB ATA100. This HD comes with an 80 pin connector.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=27#jump11

Now my question is will this new hard drive work with my current
out-dated system, are there any BIOS issue in terms of recognizing the
120 Gigabytes of space.

Any other compatibility issues to watch out for ?

Thanks
 
K

kony

Hi, I currently have a PIII system with a Gigabyte GA-60XC motherboard
which has two ATA66 IDE connectors. Current harddrive is a WD 20GB.

I plan to get another hard drive, more specifically the Western Digital
Caviar SE 120 GB ATA100. This HD comes with an 80 pin connector.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=27#jump11

Now my question is will this new hard drive work with my current
out-dated system, are there any BIOS issue in terms of recognizing the
120 Gigabytes of space.

Any other compatibility issues to watch out for ?

Thanks
Click to expand...

Your board should at least support up to 128GB, making 120GB
a good safe choice. The drive should work in ATA66 mode, it
is not a huge performance loss especially for that age of
system, just be sure to use an 80 conductor ATA66/100/133
cable instead of 40 conductor.

The only other issue that comes to mind is to be sure the WD
jumpers are right, they use a different jumper setting for
Master with slave, than for Single drive (per channel,
cable).

You might want to first open your case and inspect the
capacitors. Gigabyte boards of that era were subject to
capacitor failures (domed, vented tops or bottoms and leaky
residue), especially the larger caps around the CPU socket,
AGP slot and memory. In other words if the board were
failing then it might effect this HDD purchase??
 
J

John McGaw

Hi, I currently have a PIII system with a Gigabyte GA-60XC motherboard
which has two ATA66 IDE connectors. Current harddrive is a WD 20GB.

I plan to get another hard drive, more specifically the Western Digital
Caviar SE 120 GB ATA100. This HD comes with an 80 pin connector.
http://www.westerndigital.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=27#jump11

Now my question is will this new hard drive work with my current
out-dated system, are there any BIOS issue in terms of recognizing the
120 Gigabytes of space.

Any other compatibility issues to watch out for ?

Thanks
Click to expand...

I think you may be confused. IDE of all flavors uses a 40-pin connector,
not an 80. The higher levels of IDE, such as ATA100 and ATA133 demand an
80-conductor cable which adds ground lines between the standard lines
which enables faster data flow but the connector is still a 40-pin. The
drive should work fine in your older system but if you have problems you
can easily add an inexpensive PCI controller which will enable you to
use even massive drives at full capacity without using overlays or
unnecessary partitions.
 
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