Most reliable hdd brand?

[truflip]

hi Im planning on upgrading to a bigger harddrive so i can store my digital pictures without having to burn them on DVD disc every 2 uploads (my SD card is a 2GB card and I fill it up quite fast)

I need somethign fast and efficient but also very reliable and a good company who backs up their drives incase somethin goes wrong..

says my board handles" 4 x Serial ATA 150MB/sec with support for RAID 0, RAID1, RAID 0+1" so i guess this is just regular Sata? i cant use Sata2?

whats the difference between IDE and SATA? which is faster, more reliable and better?

 

[vnf4ultra]

I like seagate and western digital. I'm not sure if I'd spring for one of the new perpendicular recording drives yet, since they're brand new tech. As for ide vs sata, I don't notice any speed difference in regular use, but sata is a faster interface. I see it in much the same light as agp vs pci-express. Yeah, pci-e is a faster interface, but at the point when it was introduced agp cards could easily keep up with pci-e cards, since cards weren't maxing out agp's speed. Maybe eventually hd's will have more speed than ide(pata) can handle, but who knows when. I'd get a sata 150 though, since the cabling is "neater" than ide ribbon cable.

 

[mailpup]

I only have experience with Western Digital and it's worked fine for me.

A SATA II drive will work with your SATA I connection but only at SATA I speeds.

 

[truflip]

yea.. I dont know what to do with my 120GB PATA hdd.. can i mix n match IDE + SATA? Im thinking of getting a seagate barracuda. I like the 5 years warranty (vs 3 years for WD) and theyre just a couple $$ more. thanks vnf and thanks mailpup for the input

 

[SNGX1275]

Yes you can mix and match IDE and SATA. The quality on hard drives today are all virtually the same at the consumer level, so just pick one that has a low price and a good warranty.

 

[Tedster]

yes, you CAN, but you SHOULDN'T. Windows sometimes gets hung up or confused on mixed systems and defaults to IDE. If you lose your driver or get a corrupted OS, then your system will crash as windows won't know your OS is on SATA as it writes to the IDE drive. I have had this happen to me before.

Use either IDE or SATA but I don't recommend using both at the same time even though it will work. If you're just starting out, go with SATA only.