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When purchasing a drive you will hear a few
phrases like IDE, EIDE, SCSI, Ultra DMA 133 and 7200rpm, so lets explain what these
are.
IDE and SCSI refer to the connector on your motherboard that
connects to the hard drive. All new motherboards have IDE
connectors and are the most popular type of drive EIDE means
enhanced IDE, backward compatible with the IDE cable they provide
faster performance if used with a EIDE motherboard and cable. The
SCSI drives are fast and therefore are mainly only used in large
servers, they require the use of a SCSI card. Ultra DMA refers to the transfer speed of your drive. Ultra
DMA 33 drives are the older and slower drives while Ultra DMA 133
drives are the latest and faster type, If you buy a ultra DMA 133
drive for your old motherboard it may not support this speed, it
will still work but only at say ultra DMA 100 speed.
SATA is a new form of cable system that is unlike IDE, SATA means serial
ATA and is tipped to overtake IDE drives in years to come, if you are
buying a new motherboard it would be a wise idea to pick one that can
support the SATA drives.
The RPM number refers to platter rotation speed and refers to how
fast the drive spins the faster the rotation speed the faster the drive is. 5400 RPM is the
most common speed with 7200 RPM drives becoming cheaper and
therefore popular.
The other numbers you will find are Gb or gigabyte, the smallest
you will find new today would be 20Gb as 10 and 15 Gig drives are
becoming hard to find, the reason for this is probably due to the
fact that the price of drives are getting cheap. A 30 gig drive
may only cost 10 or 20 dollars more than a 20 gig drive, so get
the biggest you can afford. How big is 20 gig you may ask, well to
simplify things lets look at a floppy disk, it holds 1.44Mb
(Megabyte), lets put a 1 meg file on the disk. To get to just 1
gig you would need 1000 disks and 20 gig you would need 20000
floppy disks. |
