Which is the best (read fastest) type of hard drive for a new gaming PC? Are the Serial ATA's the best? TIA

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Serial ATA is better than Parallel ATA (IDE) drives
SCSI is great if you can afford it but really meant for high-performance servers

Which is the best (read fastest) type of hard drive for a new gaming PC? Are the Serial ATA's the best?

You will get more advantage spending the price differential between serial and parallel ATA on a better sound or graphics card. Those aspects are much more important to the gaming experience than the difference between 100/133 UDMA and SATA, in my opinion.

Serial ATA is better than Parallel ATA (IDE) drives
SCSI is great if you can afford it but really meant for high-performance servers

Just an FYI: According to Tom's Hardware guide, Serial ATA drives have almost caught up with SCSI in terms of speed and reliability. Those used to be the big things with SCSI-- speed and reliability. But, considering that Serial ATA is in between Parallel IDE and SCSI in terms of cost, but nearly up there with SCSI in performance, I'd recommend going with Serial ATA if you can afford it.

Personally, I'm going to get a Serial ATA controller card and some SATA drives in the next few months or so.

Just an FYI: According to Tom's Hardware guide, Serial ATA drives have almost caught up with SCSI in terms of speed and reliability. Those used to be the big things with SCSI-- speed and reliability. But, considering that Serial ATA is in between Parallel IDE and SCSI in terms of cost, but nearly up there with SCSI in performance, I'd recommend going with Serial ATA if you can afford it.

Personally, I'm going to get a Serial ATA controller card and some SATA drives in the next few months or so.

You do know that a SATA drive is just a SCSI drive with a different controller, don't you? That's why they're so comparable in performance.

I have to add this because I had a lapse in recollection.

The Western Digital Raptor SATA drives are the ones I'm describing, not all SATA drives. The Raptor is the 10,000rpm drive with 8MB of onboard cache, and sizes of 18, 36, and now 72.

And just as noisey! :lol:

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