Advise on HDD, new to SATA

[kilogic]

Hello, I have been contemplating what new hard drive to purchase now that my maxtor is going out (constant clicking, bad performance, general signs of close failure)

My motherboard is and Intel D865PERL and has support for SATA 150mb/s. I have been looking at either a 300GB Seagate SATA 150mb/s or a 250GB Seagate SATA II 300mb/s. The 300 gig just came off a sale (much to my dismay) and is around $150 the 250 gb is on newegg for $102. One catch is that the 300 is a retail box from a store and the 250 is oem.

The extra 50gb is negligable but i am not sure if it is worth it to go for the SATA II drive in order to give it some life for my next mobo upgrade.

I am new to this I have never owned a Seagate but have heard good things as well as their 5 year warranty. If there is a HDD you recommend I would be glad to hear it.



PS. I also haven't got the first clue as to RAID or the 0 or 1 setting. Im guessing if I just have 1 sata drive I just set up raid and theres no option for 0 or 1 is that correct? Also is the 128kb setting the best to use, i am planning to use the hdd alot.

[kenc51]

I use only Seagate HDD's.....Simply because they have 5yr warranties....no other company has that much faith in their products!
(sure WD does give 5yr warranties on the Raptor drives, but their designed for servers and are too expensive)

I've used SATA and IDE raid0 & raid1...

Radi1 is usefull if you have important data
IMO Raid0 is pointless......others may chime in stating is super fast.....
In real world situations it gives no performance.....but doubles the chances of data loss.....There are some situations where Raid0 is usefull, like servers, video production etc. Some will also say games will load quicker, but it's too risky IMO.

[kilogic]

Thanks for the response. Do you think i should go with a 150mb or 300mb if my system only supports 150? do you think it doesnt matter?

Also do you know if you can clone a pata to a sata drive. i know theres alot of hdd cloning software, do they normally work between both formats?

[kenc51]

There is no difference between sata150 and 300
300 will allow more of a burst speed, this doesn't give any real world difference
If you can, get sata300 as it does give a little more performance

BUT your motherboard will only support sata150 but will still work with a sata300 drive, It will just run @ sata150 speeds

Sata 150 / 300 -> this is how fast the interface is.......current hard drives can only sustain speeds of max ~65mb/s.
Sata will allow for upto 150mb/s or 300mb/s but if the hdd can't even hit 100mb/s it's pointless!
Even if you run raid0 each hdd will have 1500 or 300mb/s available to each drive/cable!

Cloning data from an IDE drive to a SATA drive is no prob.........

[Dragon_Cooler]

yeah that is the reason WD didnt go with 300mb in thier new raptors is simpy because nothing they did would saturate the full 150mb. I do nothing but WD, i guess everyone has thier opinions ( the differance between ford and chevy) But if you can deff. go with SATA 150 the speed it well worth it!

[FZ1]

I'd go with the 300 for just a bit of future proofing. Also, look for drives with a 16MB cache. Maxtor has supposedly fixed the issues with the NF4 boards but I'd be wary.

[Dragon_Cooler]

I'd go with the 300 for just a bit of future proofing. Also, look for drives with a 16MB cache. Maxtor has supposedly fixed the issues with the NF4 boards but I'd be wary.

what problems were they having?

[FZ1]

There were a lot of issues where the drives would "disappear" in the BIOS and thus not be bootable. There were some firmware fixes but they didn't always work (didn't for me).

[kilogic]

yeah my maxtor is the one thats going out and out of warranty. I was leaning toward seagate but i think western digital has some good prices too. Thank you all for your input im heading up to Fry's today to see what they got sales start today.

[kilogic]

Well i took your guys' advise and found a pretty good deal at best buy of all places.

It's a WD 250gb 300mb/s command queing and 16mb cache. The only downside is its 1 year warranty. Of all the things they offer service plans on they didnt have one.

Wish me luck, and i havent installed it yet, caught a bad cold, but when i do i might be back for some raid help lol.

Thank you all for your input.

[FZ1]

Nice, I have 2 of those drives. Enjoy!

[KnightRid]

PS. I also haven't got the first clue as to RAID or the 0 or 1 setting. Im guessing if I just have 1 sata drive I just set up raid and theres no option for 0 or 1 is that correct? Also is the 128kb setting the best to use, i am planning to use the hdd alot.

Umm...if you only have 1 drive you cant use RAID...unless you can use RAID with partitions...

Mike

[Dragon_Cooler]

PS. I also haven't got the first clue as to RAID or the 0 or 1 setting. Im guessing if I just have 1 sata drive I just set up raid and theres no option for 0 or 1 is that correct? Also is the 128kb setting the best to use, i am planning to use the hdd alot.

Umm...if you only have 1 drive you cant use RAID...unless you can use RAID with partitions...

Mike

cant, you have to have 2 physical drives. Raid is a great but it is more expensive.

[kilogic]

oh ok, see i really didnt know much about this stuff.

My intel info that came with my motherboard had crazy instructions for installing a sata drive that made it a raid 0 format and it came with raid drivers and whatever but i just got done doing all the western digital stuff that was easy as hell and automatically cloned my old boot drive to the new sata.

Its all up and running now. Is their anything i should do, the intel stuff said to install their application accelerator 3 with raid support and to give it a 128kb setup or whatever..
Basically, i feel like i did what WD told me to and so far it seems fine, should i mess with anything else?

Also, Last question!! I left my old drive as a master on ide and just changed to boot config to make it secondary to my sata. Is that ok? and if so can i also have a secondary ide up there to make a total of 3 hdds?

[werty316]

Yeah you can have both IDE HDs connected with a SATA HD; you just need to change the setting in the bios to what HD you want to boot to.

I also would go with Seagate. After all 5yrs warranty is great.

[wuzy]

There were a lot of issues where the drives would "disappear" in the BIOS and thus not be bootable. There were some firmware fixes but they didn't always work (didn't for me).

FYI it's a timing issue on particular Seagate 7200.9 and a few other Maxtor SATAII drives.

It can be solved at either BIOS or HDD firmware level.
The alternative would be to buy a separate SATA controller that has timing which works.

[kilogic]

I know your probably sick of hearing from me but my new drive is running at about 55 to 61 degrees celcius.

I have moved it to a better spot with more room, then i put a new front fan in blowing right on it to get all the air out from under it. That only dropped it down a few degrees.

HDD Health and HDD Life both give me critical overheat errors. Is this something that is normal for sata drives or is this a place to be worried?

[wuzy]

I know your probably sick of hearing from me but my new drive is running at about 55 to 61 degrees celcius.

I have moved it to a better spot with more room, then i put a new front fan in blowing right on it to get all the air out from under it. That only dropped it down a few degrees.

HDD Health and HDD Life both give me critical overheat errors. Is this something that is normal for sata drives or is this a place to be worried?

The sensor on HDD and S.M.A.R.T. rarely reports wrong temperature unlike sensors on motherboard so I'd say they're fairly accurate.
HDD should be kept under 50C.

The best way for you to determine if it's overheating is to touch the sides of your HDD(hottest spot). Anything over 55C should feel pretty hot to human fingers.