hard drives

[stu]

I am running an abit bx6 rev 2 mbo and want to upgrade my hard drive. I was looking at going with with scsi. Anyone got any recommendations or should I stay with IDE as I have now?

[HOTRODk62]

If it were me, I'd buy the new quantum fireball KA+ or whatever, it is awesome, for an ide drive, although I haven't seen specs, I know that the previous 5400 rpm quantum fireball drives were a tad faster even than the ibm 7200 rpm deskstars, so this one should get it, it's 7200 rpm 512 kb buffer, and has a seek time of like 8.5 ms. and it's ultra 66. I've seen it around the web for like 170 bucks for a 9 or 10 gig, should save alot over a scsi card, and drive.

[stu]

tks for comments. u'll have to excuse my ignorance but my bx6 manual says 'on board I/O 2 udma/33 ide' does this mean i cant run a udma 66 ???

[Stan]

Yep... U-DMA 66 is backward compatible with U-DMA 33.

You won't use the full potential of the HD, that's it !

Stan

[stu]

tks... ok if i'm not gunna utilise the h.d fully what shud i get for this mbo that will
give me the same performance as the fireball ??

[ANTONIO E GUERRA]

I like IBM Scsi, but it is a question of opinion. In my opinion, they are all alike in terms of performance but I will be careful because the scsi hard drives tend to run hot. In some cases, you need to add a fan.

[This message has been edited by ANTONIO E GUERRA (edited 06-14-99).]

[SysOpt]

As with most hardware, it really depends on how you plan to use the drive. If you just have a couple Netscape windows open now and then, and do some gaming, IDE will be fine. If you do serious multitasking with 10 Netscape windows open, Photoshop running, all the while unzipping a huge file on a drive, and/or if you do any disk intensive stuff like video editing, etc., SCSI is definitely the way to go.

I fit the latter category and have been using the 9GB 10k RPM Seagate Cheetah UW SCSI drive for about 12 months now and it has been great. It does run HOT though, but I've always had some kind of fan for it, currently an I-storm. I ordered the 18.2GB Seagate SCSI Cheetah 10k RPM U2W drive yesterday, and am going to replace the I-storm with PC Power and Cooling's Bay-Cool (two of them, one for the 9GB drive and one for the 18.2GB)... Check out this link for good HD cooler reviews: http://www.storagereview.com/articles/9809/980923coolers.html

Scott

[This message has been edited by SysOpt (edited 06-14-99).]

[stu]

tks all. When I ctr-alt-del i have 19 apps running before i even start doing anything; god knows why or how.

I dont do any heavy video editing but often have several windows open and I run pretty
heavy games such as unreal etc.

I dont think I can use an SCSI drive to its full capacity after all.

If I put the fireball in can I use my seagate ide as a secondary drive or are the ide - ultra incompatible??

[MadMax]

19 apps? That's alot of background activity at startup. Run system configuration utility to find out what all those progs are.

[stu]

ok I have the following running :

norton system doctor, ditto 1 step bakup, smart center, explorer, DU meter, Mem turbo, remind 32, suitest, reminder, atisched, rundll, symmon, systray. navapw 32, norton protect, rnaapp. lts start, and cgmenu.

I have no idea what they all do. But needles to say when I install a new hard drive hopefully there wont be so much activity.

So i think i'll go with the quantum fireball 13 gb 7200. SCSI drives a tad expensive in the U.K. I guess i can still hook up my old IDE as secondary ?