I have a 2 year old dell dimension 3000s with a rather small case (housing) so there's no extra slots for drives. I removed the floppy disk drive and added a second hard drive in there by attaching it to the ide cable when the floppy drive had been connected, and its works great. (it even created a second little drive (or section) called System Sav. Now I would like to upgrade that to a 300gb hard drive My main hd is only 40gigs... so I need more room/ In looking at hard drives I am seeing a new connector type that I don;t think would work on my older pc, ATA, pparently has a wire that connects to the mother board.. so I amlooking for hd's that say IDE My question is, will this work in my Dimension: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=8725226960&sspagename=ADME:B:AAQ:US:1 it says IDE and think it would be fine but I want to be sure before I order it as I have have the same seen the model Maxtor Diamondmax 10, that say ATA and thatit needs a 9 pin connector interface. I am running xp and with a 1.6ghz pentium processor. If someone knows of a better way, or any informatioon would be helpful. Thank You in adavance. Albert
can be either ata or sata according to this info. Technical Specifications Serial ATA or Parallel interface: - SATA/300 or SATA/150 interface with native command queuing - ATA/133 Average seek time: <9.0 Rotational speed: 7200 RPM 8MB cache buffer on 80GB to 200GB and 16MB cache buffers on 200GB to 300GB Parallel or Serial ATA interface: - ATA/133 - SATA/150 Interface with Native Command Queuing Fluid Dynamic Bearings Maxtor Shock Protection System Maxtor Data Protection System RoHS compliant version available so check with the contact or phone them! also this is in the wrong forum so will have a mod/admin move this to "other pc hardware" forum.
First of all: IDE = ATA so don't let that be the confusing factor. Any drive that is advertised as IDE is suited for your computer. Your system (probably) does not have a SATA (Serial ATA)-connector on it's motherboard, so you should definitely choose an ATA (= IDE)hard drive. The link you post speaks of an IDE hard drive so that drive is compatible with your computer. As a rule of thumb: a drive that is advertised as IDE IS an ATA drive (nowadays also called "Parallel ATA), Serial ATA drives are always advertised as SATA. ANY IDE/ATA hard drive will work in your computer, SATA drives are only compatible with computers that have a SATA-connector on their motherboard. I hope any possible confusion is gone now. Good luck!
ATA/133 is the SPEED of the IDE interface. There's also ATA/100 and slower IDE interfaces for IDE drives. If your motherboard only connects at ATA/100 and you buy and ATA/133 drive, no problem, the speed is limited by the slowest device.
