New IDE hardrive questions.

  • Thread starter Thread starter OVS
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OVS

I'm looking to upgrade a friends relatively old PC. For now we are just
going to upgrade his Hard-drive. The one he has now is is a maxtor 20GB
IDE ATA/66.
I'm going to order a new drive and the two I've picked so far are:

Maxtor 6B200P0 Diamondmax 10 200Gb 7200rpm ATA133 8mb Cache
Seagate ST3200822A Barracuda 7200.7 Plus 200GB Ultra ATA/100 7200rpm 8mb
Cache

They are both roughly the same price. I'm assuming they will both work
fine on an older speced machine. Am I correct? For now I'm guessing his
PC will not be able to utilise the ATA/100 or ATA/133 speeds. But he
will be replacing his PC in the near future, so I want the drive to be
as fast as possible for the future, yet able to work on an older machine.

Price being the same which would be the better drive of the two in terms
of reliability. If the same, I should opt for the Maxtor, I guess(I'm
guessing a lot here!).

Thanks
 
OVS said:
I'm looking to upgrade a friends relatively old PC. For now we are just
going to upgrade his Hard-drive. The one he has now is is a maxtor 20GB
IDE ATA/66.
I'm going to order a new drive and the two I've picked so far are:

Maxtor 6B200P0 Diamondmax 10 200Gb 7200rpm ATA133 8mb Cache
Seagate ST3200822A Barracuda 7200.7 Plus 200GB Ultra ATA/100 7200rpm 8mb
Cache

They are both roughly the same price. I'm assuming they will both work
fine on an older speced machine. Am I correct? For now I'm guessing his
PC will not be able to utilise the ATA/100 or ATA/133 speeds. But he
will be replacing his PC in the near future, so I want the drive to be
as fast as possible for the future, yet able to work on an older machine.

Price being the same which would be the better drive of the two in terms
of reliability. If the same, I should opt for the Maxtor, I guess(I'm
guessing a lot here!).

Thanks
Click to expand...


How old is "relatively old?" What OS is he using? We need more info.
Older systems might not recognize 200GB so you'd be throwing away bucks.
 
How old is "relatively old?" What OS is he using? We need more info.
Older systems might not recognize 200GB so you'd be throwing away bucks.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the reply, bearman. I should have been a bit clearer in my
original post. Sorry.

It's 3 year old system I think. An 800MHz AMD (AMD-750 irongate chipset),
256 MB SDRAM. Its using Windows XP with the latest service pack.

Thats basically all I remember. I'll make sure to get more details next
time I see him.
 
OVS said:
Thanks for the reply, bearman. I should have been a bit clearer in my
original post. Sorry.

It's 3 year old system I think. An 800MHz AMD (AMD-750 irongate chipset),
256 MB SDRAM. Its using Windows XP with the latest service pack.

Thats basically all I remember. I'll make sure to get more details next
time I see him.
Click to expand...

You would need to make sure the BIOS is LBA 48bit. If not the maximum
hard drive size is 128GB, (137GB in HD makers speak). There may be a
BIOS up-date available, or you could add a card with 48bit BIOS.

The MB may not allow above ATA66, but most all drives are now TA100/133.
The speed, (7200RPM), is more important anyway.

Adding more RAM might also be a good idea. XP likes at least 512MB.

Virg Wall
 
You would need to make sure the BIOS is LBA 48bit. If not the maximum
hard drive size is 128GB, (137GB in HD makers speak). There may be a
BIOS up-date available, or you could add a card with 48bit BIOS.
Click to expand...

Thanks for that info Virg, I'll check on that next time I see the PC.
The MB may not allow above ATA66, but most all drives are now TA100/133.
The speed, (7200RPM), is more important anyway.
Click to expand...

arhh.. Wish I had noted down his motherboard model. I'll find that out
also. I'm hoping ATA 100/133 will be fine with it, will make life much
easier!
Adding more RAM might also be a good idea. XP likes at least 512MB.

Virg Wall
Click to expand...

We're looking on Ebay for a cheap 256MB / 512MB stick.

Thnaks for the reply Virg.
 
Think again. The motherboard's BIOS in that older machine will NOT
recognize the new large harddrives. I would suspect it might not even
recognize a harddrive as small as 40 GB; positively NOT 200 GB.
 
Think again. The motherboard's BIOS in that older machine will NOT
recognize the new large harddrives. I would suspect it might not even
recognize a harddrive as small as 40 GB; positively NOT 200 GB.
Click to expand...


Possible, but any that was reasonably supported should at
least have a bios update to allow up to 128GB.
 
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