Hello, I have an ASUS A7N8X Deluxe motherboard with an Athlon XP 2100+ and I would like to know what would be the best hard drives to purchase for this motherboard. Any ideas?

-Thanks

You can't get optimal hard drives for a board, but you can get optimal hard drives for your needs.

It all depends on you. This board can have a total of 4 IDE devices, so if you allready have a DVD & CD-RW, you have two places left for HDDs.

Since you have the deluxe version, you can add SATA drives, in normal mode or in RAID setups ( up to two drives I believe ).

If you're not going for SATA, I believe many people like the WD drives with 8mb Cache. Or Seagate if you're into a silent machine.

As for SATA drives, I can't really say since I haven't used any. You can always get normal IDE drives & use a SATA-to-IDE converter.

SATA is supposed to bring the transfer speeds up to 150mb/s, much better then ATA133 but since the SATA chip is connected to the PCI bus on the board, you'll still be limited the PCI's 133mb/s transfer speed ( in other words, you won't be getting the maximum of your SATA drives ).

Thanks for responding. I think I'm going to go with a seagate for the silence in the end. Thanks again.

A very good answer .

Just another point,

Some SATA Drives are available in 10000+ rpm varieties which in theory may make them faster, and I have not seen this in standard IDE drives.