hardware-hard drive question

[Guest]

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.

 

[R. McCarty]

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.

 

[Guest]

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.

 

[R. McCarty]

OK, thanks for the elaboration. A 133 will work fine on a 100
IDE channel.

 

[Lil' Dave]

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.

 

[Yves Leclerc]

Just at "slower" speeds, until you add a true ATA133 controller.