I read that SATA drives are much faster then standard EIDE drives. Does anyone know what the spec are on these two formats. Thanks, Debbie

SATA drives are not `much' faster than IDE drives. The difference is minimal.

Yeah, like ham said. The drives are just to slow to use all of that bandwidth (150MB/s) Todays disks can't even use all the bandwidth that ATA 133 has to offer! I've heard a lot of people say sata is just not worth it. (the smaller cables are pretty cool though!) Symbios

Thanks, that really changes my way of thinking, which is good. Why pay more then you need to. Your opinion: Would it be worth getting a 36gb raptor drive for the OS and main high res games and then getting a EIDE drive for all other apps and things? Thanks, Debbie

I would get two EIDE 40 gig ATA 133 7200 RPM less than 9 sec seek time with 8 meg cache and run then in a stripping RAID 0 Array. Then make sure you have a good AGP 4x or 8x video card with FAST RAM speeds. Also make sure the Video card's hardware supports DirecX 9. In Video cards, the actual clock speed of the GPU is far less important than the speed of the RAM on the card. Get that? Fast RAM on your video card is a GOOD thing. Also make sure you have some good name brand RAM running on your Mainboard. For your processor. I would get one with a large cache. Say 512 meg. NOT all processors are created equally. That's why True P4's are better than Celerons and Some AMD's for gaming systems. Minimum of say 2.0 ghz. clock speed. If your motherboard doesn't have RAID capapbilities then you can buy a PCI RAID card to run those drives in a RAID 0 array. I'd say that would set you up nicely. Hope this helps.

Ok, Debbie isn't building a whole new computer here! ...Or are you? lol I would get the Raptor definitely. Forget RAID 0, I use it; it's fast that's for sure. But you have to make backups all the time because if something goes wrong the chances of recovering your data are very slim. I am always worrying about something happening, it's just not worth it. I'm thinking of ditching the RAID getting a Raptor also but I don’t know. Symbios

OH, but I am building a whole new system. I just purchased a Asus K8Vse Deluxe Athlon 64 mothboard and AMD Athlon 64 3200 CPU. I will also be getting a ATI Radeon 9800 Pro 128mg video card. So you think just going with 2 EIDE 7200 RPM, 8mg should do? That would be good, better price. What memory brands are good to go with and which one to avoid? Kingston Corsair Samsung Centon Geil Mushkin Viking Crucial OCZ Buffalo Kingmax SimpleTech Thanks for all you help, Debbie