Do I need SATA or UDMA?

[Tokyoprince]

Hi,
newbee here, I wish to fit an additional drive to my PC and make it the boot drive. The drive adverts seem to specify SATA or UDMA133, but I don't know which one to buy? My PC is over 2 years old and the XP Device Manager show my controller as IDE ATA/ATAPI. Will either type work or do I need a specific one? Many thanks

[Dee306]

Hi, I'm in the same boat. I also need to upgrade and am confused with the types
of connections available.

My mother board takes a 40 pin ide cable, not sure what speed bus it is.

I was after a 200GB drive and was looking at the Western Digital Caviar 200GB SATA150 8MB or
Western Digital WD2000BB 200GB UIDE 100 2MB. would both these drives work in my computer?

Is there anywhere that tells me the differanace between the connections available?

Thanks,
Dee.

[Tokyoprince]

Hi,
think I maybe answering my own question here. After a bit of poking around it looks like SATA has a totally different kind of connection to the motherboard, a bunch of about 7 wires, whereas UDMA has the familiar wide ribbon cable. So I reckon if the existing drive has a wide ribbon cable then UDMA is what I need. Any confirmation of these observations would be greatly aprpeciated.

[Catweazle]

If your motherboard does not accomodate SATA drives then you can't use one.

In addition, the onlt ATA133 (or UDMA133 if you want to use that term) drives that I know of are Maxtor brand, and I wouldn't go near them. Had too many problems with Maxtor drives in the past!

ATA100 is fine to use. The data transfer speed listed is an 'ideal situation' thing and won't be reached consistently anyway.

The important factor is to get a drive of 7200rpm or netter, and with 8Mb of cache. 2Mb cache drives have lower performance.

It's really the rotation speed and the amount of cache that gives performance, not some fancy number in its description ;)