Hi,
I'm upgrading my pc and I've just bought a Core 2 QUAD, a Gigabyte motherboars, 4Gb DDR2,a new Geforce Video card and I'm now thinking whether or not to change also my Seagate 350 Gb with a new SATA hard disk.
Is it worth the investment...or maybe is better if a spend the money for a new Camera?
CanadaRAM
Favorite Answer
Assuming that the motherboard supports SATA -
The interface of the drive, whether IDE (PATA) 100 MB/s or SATA 150 MB/s or SATA 300 MB/s will make very little difference, because hard drives usually cannot read or write data fast enough to be limited by the interface. Most hard drives get about 80 MB/s throughput, the very fastest ones about 105. (Mercuri, you are wrong there)
Now you may be able to get a small increase in speed if you install a new larger hard drive, if the new drive has higher areal density on the platters -- more data will pass under the heads for each revolution of the drive. But it won't be earthshaking.
Also if your current drive is nearly full, it's running much slower on the inner tracks of the drive. (all drives lose about half of their throughput on the inner tracks vs the outermost tracks). If you get a large drive to replace a full, small drive, then your data will be on the outer tracks, and you'll regain some performance.
Anonymous
With a SATA hard drive, you're going to have faster data access than with an older PATA drive. it might very well be worth the expense. Plus, motherboards nowadays only have 1 IDE controller on them meaning that you'd have to put your old IDE drive and your DVD/CD drive on the same ribbon, which can slow you down as well. Plus hard drives are so cheap now that it's almost silly not to upgrade.
Jazon1
best buy has a seagate 1 terabyte sata2 drive on sale for $140 bucks.very good deal and yes its worth switching i havent used a ide drive in years now too slow.
helpdesk916 ♦♣♠♥
- Try a new DSLR camera as long as your computer runs.
- Or just save money for rainy day.