Hard Drive recomendations

[Harrison]

If your current IDE controller support ATA100 or ATA133 drives and their speeds then you won't see much difference using SATA drives over them. However if your IDE controller is older and only supports ATA66 or the even slower ATA33 then you will get a big improvement switching over to SATA.

However it isn't that clear cut. If you added an SATA card to an older system then other factors will effect the speed that the card can access and send data from the drives to the system. The front side bus speed of the motherboard will be much slower in older systems slowing things down, as will slower ram, and the PCI bus might be slower too.

The biggest advantage to getting SATA drives now is really their ease of installation, and the fact they are more future proof them IDE drives. If you built a new system at some point in the future you would be able to easily stick the SATA drives into it. But IDE is quickly dying as a format and most new motherboards only had a single IDE port for use for IDE DVD/CD drives (it is the only think I used IDE for still).

SATA also gets rid of the horrible big ribbon cables and leaves you with a nice small thin cable for the data, and a small connector for the power (you would probably need to buy a molex to SATA adaptor cable).

If you are interested in SATA then a card such as the following one from Novatech would be ideal and only costs £14.53

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/s...html?NOV-SATAR