I am bulding a new computr shortly and i am confused about if i should get a Sata HDD or a IDE. people have told me that Sata's hae a higher transfer rate but they have also said that it makes not much diffrence.

I can either get a Sata 250 Gb HDD for $160 or i can get a IDE 320 Gb for the same price. what should i do?

It doesn't, most transfer rates are at 66mb. The 2 most important things in a HDD is the cache size and rpms. Since almost every desktop hard drive has at least 7200rpm or higher, where it varies is the cache sizes from 2mb, 8mb to 16mb.

Just make sure whatever you choose in regards to SATa and IDE, get one that has at least 7200rpm and 16mb of cache.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Yes well the IDe one has 16 Mb of cache and so does the Sata. they are both seagate so i might get the IDE.

Theoretically a SATA drive has the potential to be faster as the SATA interface can handle more date faster then an IDE interface can. The IDE interface has just about reached the limit as to how fast it can go.

However, internally there is not much difference between a SATA drive and an IDE drive so the limiting factor is how fast the drive can supply the data. Consequently, at present there is not much to chose between the two.

As drive technology progresses, faster spin rates, more densely packed data, faster seek times, etc the SATA drives will get faster.

Stuart

Well i have one more question. Does the core 2 which you recommended in another post come with a heatsink and a fan or do i have to buy one.

Yes the retail one does the OEM doesn't.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

Make sure to check that your MoBo can handle more than one IDE drive as your CD/DVD is going to need one. My friend setup his drive like this and it didnt work and he had to go out an get a SATA drive...

TJ297 All Prices are in Auzzie Dollars =D

AMD 3800+
2 Gig RAM
Nvidia 7800GT
Thermaltake 430w PSU
Antec LAN-boy Case
Onboard Sound WOOOOT
Surprisingly not bad :p

Well I do have 2 HDD's and 2 Optical Drives, I a only going to have 1 HDD when I get my new computer so i will have one spare.

one advantage to IDE is if your computer goes wrong you can connect your hard drive to another computer to get data off it. Virtually all computers have IDE sockets so you could use most any computers to retrieve the data. If the disc is SATA you are limiting which computers you can use for this purpose.
And in the same way it can help to format the drive as FAT and not NTFS as that means it can be read by computers that have older versions of windows on. If format is NTFS it can not be read by win98 computer for example.
(but i do accept that older computers might not be able to read a 320gb hard disc due to bios limitation on disc size)
It might never happen but you might want to bear this points in mind.

SATA is fiddley when installing an O/S. IDE is much easyer, you plug it in and it works. I suppose thats because its been around for quite some time now, good 'ol IDE.

Mattwizz3 : )

Sempron 2600+ @ 2.2GHz
1Gb DDR400
Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe
200GB SATA
2X 80Gb IDE
256Mb MSI 6800 Ultra

SATA is fiddley when installing an O/S. IDE is much easyer, you plug it in and it works.

Long live IDE!

i_XpUser

Hopefully when Vista goes gold installing on OS on an SATA problems will be a thing of the past.

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ OC 2.7ghz
2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200
Nvidia 7900GT
SATA II 2x 300gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0
Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI