hardware-hard drive question

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I have an older model dell (xps T series~6 years old) that has an IDE ATA100
hard drive connection. I am looking to upgrade to a larger hard drive. Can
I use IDE ATA133 without a problem, what about serial ATA150? Essentially
what is the difference between ATA100/133-serial ATA150 (apart from just
speed) and what is compatible with my system.
 
IDE/ATAPI speed is purely a function of the Chipset on the
motherboard. UDMA mode 5 (100 Mhz ) is "Officially" the
last standard. There is UDMA mode 6, but only two vendors
actually support it (I believe Maxtor is one).

There is now two SATA standards I & II, II which doubles
the data throughput to 300 Megabytes a second. SATA has
a single device per channel. There is no daisy-chaining as in
PATA IDE with Master/Slave setups.

Depending on your system, a SATA drive can obtain higher
average speeds at or above 50 Megabytes a second.

You could get a PCI SATA card and purchase a SATA disk
drive. However, on a 6-year old PC you'd be better served
by a newer PC. A motherboard/CPU/Memory swap might
be a consideration - but with costs these days it's just not as
much of a viable option. Yesterday, I saw an eMachines PC
at Office depot for $458 that had 512 Memory, DVD-RW
optical and a 2.6 AMD CPU.
 
I'm actually just looking into putting a new hard drive into the computer for
my son to use for everyday use, so I am not looking to put a lot into it.
It currently has 20gb and I want to upgrade it to around 80gb. I saw that
there are ATA100 and ATA133 availible. I want to know if the 133 will screw
up the computer.
 
Won't baffle you with tech details. The ATA133 drive willl downshift to the
ATA100 standard if that's all the motherboard supports. This is a PATA
drive. If the ATA133 HD is more expensive, you should find a ATA100 HD, use
that instead.

SATA drives use an entirely different connector. You can't use it on your
system as is.
 
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