Help, buying hard drive

[pcmech007]

I'm looking at getting a 30GB 7200rpm hard drive.

I can get a ata-66 cheaper than a ata-100, but I'm not sure if this would be a performance penalty. Is it stupid to get a 7200rpm drive with ata-66 connection speed?

Also, do you need special ide cables for ata-100?

[Andy_L]

About ATA66 vs. 100 I dont know, if you have only a 66 controller, I would get the cheaper drive, if its a lot cheaper I would get it anyway, the performance hit is minimal. You need an 80 conductor, 40 pin cable, just like UDMA66 for UDMA100.

[Fingers]

Check the two links I posted in this (http://www.sysopt.com/forum/Forum1/HTML/013711.html) thread, they directly address your question. (If your only gonna read one, the second one is shorter and more to the point.)

Hard drives are constantly benefitting from new technology, and even though the ATA-100 standard doesn't provide any real benefits over ATA-66 with current hard drives, the ATA-100 version may be an over-all better product just because it's a little newer than the older drive.