I am in the process of researching components for a brand new machine. The motherboard I believe I've settled on is an MSI K8N Neo 4-F socket 939 with an AMD +3200 Venice Core CPU. I want to do video/media work (as well as other things) and I was wondering what size and what harddrive manufacturers you would recommend. Never had a SATA drive before but Have been reading up on them. Are they necessary to meet the demands? Thanks.
I would go for either samsung spinpoints or western digital raid editon hard drives just my personal choice....will you be having a raid array ?
jonni3, Appreciate the quick reply. And here is my ignorance: What is a raid array? What does it provide? When I built my one and only PC 5 years ago it was much, much simpler. But I am finding that there is TONS of stuff I am having to learn as I go. Also, what is the difference between a WD cavier (spelling?)HD and a Raid one? Os is there? Thanks for your patience.
Zeyf414 heres a brief discription of the different raid arrays http://www.google.co.uk/pagead/iclk...words_campaign=raid_ad=023041&_search_kw=raid as for the diffrerence between the drives this is what western digital have to say http://www.wdc.com/en/products/Products.asp?DriveID=114&Language=en .. hope this helps you out
Ive tried quite a few drives now,i think the only one i havent is samsung.Im using a couple of western Digital raptors at the moment, a 36gb for my OS and progs, and a 74gb for ripping.10000rpm of pure speed and bliss!Not a hiccup yet and ive had them for 6 months.Cant say the same for the several maxtors and deskstars ive tried and binned, no back up at all from the manufacturers.The seagate i had that went strange after a month was replaced within 7 days by them, superb back up.But I havent tried sending a drive back to WD cos it aint broke!Any other drive seems like a slug!!
So, pieman, and here I'll show my ignorance again, are the Western Digital raptors more difficult to install than a WD IDE connection? (I hope I am asking this right). Are they considerably more expensive?
Raptors are damn expensive and only come i 2 sizes 36 & 74GB, they have a standard sata fitment and are no more difficult to fit than any other harddrive .... sorry for answering a question directed @ someone else
Zeyf414 you don't need any RAID array for what you want to do. If you wanna do video/media work the only thing you have to think about is drive SIZE ! Just buy a big hard drive (200GB or more), whether it's a Samsung, Seagate, Western Digital, Hitachi, Maxtor or whatever, you really can't go wrong with any of todays available hard drives. They're all well suited. In the old days there were disks that were especially suited for video\audio purposes, but that's a thing of the past. You don't need a raptor or other "Ultimate performance" disk, today all disks are of such a performance level they are excellent for video / media work. Check some computer shops in your neighbourhood for a good hard disk with a good size to price ratio. Good luck!
Well I certainly feel better since posting especially not having to worry about RAID, raptor, or anything other than a good solid drive. I just want to make this next build as right as possible for my needs, etc. But with so much changing technology in such a rapid fashion it is hard to know the essentials from the periphials at times. Bakbukkem, someone told me that anything over 80 gigs is getting into stability issues. Is this true? How about transfer rates? I can just imagine the time spent defragging!
The motherboard you have in mind shouldn't have any (stability or other) problems with hard drives well over 80 GB. Today's motherboards all have chipsets and BIOSes that support large hard disks. So don't worry about that. Of course defragmenting a 200GB drive that's about 80% full is a b*tch, but that's almost unavoidable. My own 200GB disk is about 80% full, and I have given up on defragmenting it regularly, because that takes forever. But I never have any problems playing large movie files and films. Transfer rates and overall drive speed are high enough for smooth trouble free video playback. And this is just a regular, normal, WD Caviar ATA100 drive.
Okay, I am settled. You guys helped a whole lot. One last question. If a mobo states it is ATA 133 designed, will it be compatible with an ATA 100 harddrive?
Yep! No problem. Motherboards that boast ATA133 are downwards compatible, meaning you can also use ATA100, ATA66 or ATA33 drives.
Well I thought I was done with my questions but I need to know about Seagate quality/dependability. I went to Newegg to look at the latest reviews on Western Digital harrdrives (the only ones I have ever used) and I was astonished at the number of recent posts bt people who have had serious issues with this brand very recently. So, anyone use Seagate? How do you like this brand? Thanks once again.
To Zeyf414: I am very interested in the Maxtor Maxline III 300gb SATA 7200rpm harddrive. It has 16mb of buffer ram and has dominated a lot of recent bench mark scores due to its large 16mb buffer. Plus at newegg.com it is between $120-130 bucks depending on the sales you catch.
Wow, novicebb, that is one serious harddrive. I have seen Maxtor but have absolutely no experience with them nor do I know anyone who has. Do you have any idea as to Maxtor's reputation for quality and dependability?
