I have an old 40 gig IDE HD in my comp. (Got it like 5 years ago). Would I notice a difference with a new SATA HD? thx

It can. It would slow down caching, and level loading in particular. However, it's hard to say if it would do you more good than say a video card upgrade without knowing your full system specs, and what games you play. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org

That would depend on the specs of your 40GB HDD. If it's an older model running at 5400RPM with a 2MB buffer (or less), & you upgrade to a much larger SATA HDD at 7200RPM with either 8MB or 16MB buffer, there would definitely be a noticeable difference. But the same could be said about another IDE HDD with similar specs. It would help if you listed your system specs. Is your Sempron the socket A version or socket 754? What motherboard/chipset? How much RAM? What video card? Does your board support SATA or would you have to buy a controller card?

Your HDD only comes into play during loading, saving, and memory swapping. If you have enough memory you hardly ever have to swap out so the better investment is to max out your memory. One thing you have to consider is that an older HDD has seen more "miles" on it and is more likely to fail. At the price of a new 200GB HDD these days it's hardly worth it to keep it around.

"Your HDD only comes into play during loading, saving, and memory swapping. If you have enough memory you hardly ever have to swap out so the better investment is to max out your memory." That's a bit over simplistic. The reality is windows will always page. You can max out your RAM, and it will still page some, although maybe not as much. If you rig Windows to not have a page file, it often will run slower even if you have enough physical RAM to theoretically do this. Therefore, maxing your memory out isn't the better investment necessarily. If your system is *excessively* paging, a RAM upgrade makes more sense, but otherwise a faster hard drive may be a better way to go. As a Windows Engineer, I can say on desktops as well as servers, disk throughput is the absolute most overlooked potential bottleneck in a computer. Please help survivors of Hurricane Katrina! www.redcross.org