Can someone tell me the difference between Serial ATA, Ultra ATA & Ultra DMA ? The Seagate 200gb is Ultra ATA 100. According to the board manual and the BIOS they will support LBA 48-bit and so will XP SP2. But will I need anything else like PCI ATA Controller Card or any special hardware connections? I also have another machine with an Abit NF8-V Socket 754 mobo,Athlon 64 3000+,Western Digital Ultra DMA/100 80GB HDD,Segate Ultra DMA/100 20GB,DVD-RW & floppy also running Home XP SP2. Board manual says it supports SATA NV RAID,I'm guessing that since this board has an nVidia chipset that is what the NV stands for,but I'm not sure I understand RAID. Does it mean two seperate disk drives connected by a controller for better preformance or is it one drive or will I ever understand??? Anyway do I need a PCI Controller Card to use the drives on the Abit as ATA/DMA? I also have round cables in both pc's and all say ATA/100/133 these do make a difference in data transfer rate compared to the regular round cables yes? ECS 848P-A7 LGA755 Pentium4 505J 2.66GHz Seagate 20GB HDD P.M Seagate 200GB HDD S.M. CD-ROM P.S. DVD-RW S.S. 1GB PC3200 DDR400 Raidmax Scorpio Case PSU 420 watt Award BI

Seperate yours questions into parts/paragraphs would make it easier to read.

Ultra ATA (ATA33): refinement/improvement on the Advanced Technology Attachment standard, enabling faster burst transfers (33MB/s). Later ATA specs also encorporate LBA capabilities, i.e., ATA133 spec includes 133MB/s transfers AND 48-bit LBA. Ultra DMA: protocol used for faster burst mode data transfers. Ultra DMA/33 supports 33MB/s, Ultra DMA/66 supports 66MB/s, etc. The Ultra DMA/100 Seagate supports burst mode data transfers of up to 100MB/s. It will be fine on any ATA/133 controller, and you're not missing out on speed--I don't know of any ATA/133 drive that can burst more than 100MB/s. Most recent motherboards have ATA/133 compliant IDE controllers onboard, so you should be fine. Check your motherboard specs to be certain. Nvidia's NVRaid is a disk management feature. It can store data in a variety of ways on arrays of 2 or more physical disks. NVRaid allows striping and RAID arrays that span the motherboard's SATA and IDE controllers. RAID: Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks. True RAID uses multiple "inexpensive" disks in tandem to provide hardware-level data protection--if one drive fails, your data is not lost. A striping array (sometimes called RAID0) is a setup in which two members (single drives or RAID1 arrays) are configured to work in tandem to reduce latency on sequential reads--there is no data protection if just two single drives are used, and the failure of one drive means the data is lost from both drives. Round Cables: They are round, nothing more. They don't interfere with case airflow as much as flat ribbon cables. The ATA 66/100/133 rating is more important: it means that the cable is a 40-pin 80-conductor model that can transmit data at burst speeds of up to 133MB/s. A normal 40-pin 40-conductor cable is only good through 33MB/s. You'll be able to use the Seagate on any machine that has a free ATA/133 IDE port and an operating system able to recognize large drives (XP SP1 or later). I feel like an idiot for typing all this out. I'll feel worse if any of it's incorrect. In the future, use Google or ask one or two questions at a time. "If it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."

Oops... Serial ATA: attachment standard in which devices are connected point-to-point and rely on sequential rather than concurrent signalling. It also allows hot-swap capabilities by mandating that the connector's ground leads touch before any of the power and data leads make contact. SATA data cables can be longer and thinner than parallel IDE cables because there are fewer leads and only one bit of info sent at a time--parallel cables have many data leads transmitting data at once, resulting in interference or "crosstalk." I took for granted that the 200GB Seagate was a regular (parallel) ATA device. If it's an SATA drive, you will have to connect it to an SATA port on your motherboard or on an SATA controller card. You will also need an SATA power connector. "If it ain't broke, upgrade anyway."

Thanks for your answers and I did go to a few sites first to try and understand.In future not so many questions at once got it. Thanks ECS 848P-A7 LGA755 Pentium4 505J 2.66GHz Seagate 20GB HDD P.M Seagate 200GB HDD S.M. CD-ROM P.S. DVD-RW S.S. 1GB PC3200 DDR400 Raidmax Scorpio Case PSU 420 watt Award BI

Hay 'tropic', you planning on releasing this book in hardback form? lol Wizard ICT. Microsoft Certified Professional