New Hard drive recommendation

mdbarber

Lord_Gardener wrote: »

Back to the drives! ASRock T/s now say that SATA would be better but to set the speed to 1.5gb/s if I have a SATA II!

you'll be pushed to pick up a sata 1 drive now, try using a seagate, they usually come with a small "jumper" to set to sata 1 or 2 mode some others don't

[Deleted User]

The controller will auto sense whether it's I or II and adjust accordingly. There is no compatibility issues between the two.

Lord_Gardener

Anyone know the difference between the Hitachi 'P' and 'T' Deskstar drives? Thanks

superscaper

Lord_Gardener wrote: »

Anyone know the difference between the Hitachi 'P' and 'T' Deskstar drives? Thanks

I think the P drives are geared towards power saving/efficiency and T drives towards speed. But I'm not 100% sure.

iviv

I've been a regular on the OcUK forums for a while, and certainly hadn't heard anything like that about Spie. And while the mods are a little overzealous about deleating threads mentioning competitors (Though I can see why they're coming from), I've not seen anything like what's been mentioned here.

As for hard drives, as has been mentioned, SATA and SATAII are like USB and USB2.0. Both use exactly the same connections, and both are compatable with each other, just one is slower than the other.
And as someone near the beginning said, go for more than you think, as you can fill them up quickly if you aren't careful. If its just for normal use, then things like seek times aren't going to matter, you'll just want something with enough size. Samsung and WD are both high quality manufacturers, and I've not had problems with either. Average prices are around £1 for 11Gb, so thtat should help you figure out how good value the drive is.

Finally, one last litle thing. Hard drive manufacturers label the dive as '500gb' for example, but in reality, its actually less. The manufacturers work in 1000's. 1000Mb in a Gb, for example. But for computers, 1024Mb = 1Gb. So the 500Gb drive will actually be about 466Gb.