Technofyed

What type of hard disk should I go for and why? Should I go for SATA hard disk or IDE hard disk?

Anymore the largest, fastest, and cheapest drives are sata. Also the sata connection to the MB is faster than IDE.

In my experience the failure rate of SATA has me choosing IDE.

If storage size is your determining factor, then I would make plenty of backups. Save & save often as the term goes.

Quote:In my experience the failure rate of SATA has me choosing IDE.

WHAT???!!! please explain. this would interest me!

SATA HDD's do have a higher failure rate, but in today's high performance computing you don't see IDE being used much anymore. IDE is older technology, but still more reliable. A good idea would be to have both an IDE and SATA drive on the computer. The SATA can be the main drive, and the IDE can be the backup.

what makes ide more reliable?

I have yet to have a laptop or desktop come into my shop with an IDE hard drive that had a hardware failure.

I'm not trying to suggest that they are rock solid, & there are no known failures with the drives. However, I've had machines less than 3 months old come in with drive failure & they were running SATA. Everything from bad sectors to failed solder spots on the PCB. SATA drives are made like crap & their failure rate is horrible. Again, this is from my experience.

how about this (its basically a conclusion i drew from online studies, what you said, and my experiences...

while manufacturers are finding new ways to make drives more reliable, drives are getting less reliable as the density increases. also, the newer drives are made like crap, while the older ones were well build to the most part...

I believe the real problem with drives & their reliability is the seek time. Say one uses two 500 GB SATA drives in a mirrored RAID setup, & you are doubling the usage. With such a large storage capacity, the seek time is going to have these drives SCREAMING as extremely fast speeds. Being that they are in a mirrored RAID, they will have to perform twice as much reading & writing.

So the lower costs for higher storage causes for a shorter life span.

As a side note : SCSI drives are built like a tank, & also cost WAY more than you'll pay for SATA or IDE.

The SATA cable cables are only 7 pins wide compared to the IDE Ribbon Cable which is 40 pins. The SATA cables are also longer then the ribbon cables which make them more useful in large cases. The SATA cable is smaller, faster and accordingly better. It can reach further then a IDE cable and will also reduce the obstruction to air cooling which IDE cables can contribute to.

SATA is faster and i've never had a problem with SATA, if you're really woried then get a Raid or Solid State Drive

There is really no difference between IDE (more correctly called PATA) and SATA hard disks, except in the way they connect to the PC. The SATA connector is simpler and the cable is less fussy.

SATA is better for a couple of reasons, some just plain simplicity and some throughput. Each SATA device has its own dedicated channel. This means you don't have to worry about or fiddle with Master/Slave/Cable Select jumpers. SATA throughput, ostensibly rated at 150 is slightly better than IDE at say 133 max.