250Gb hard drives

[Stereo Steve]

Just looking to upgrade my main PC and would like to build a music server type machine. I'm going to get an Asus board that has Serial ATA and I note that you can now get 250Gb hard drives that are Serial ATA. A few questions.

1. Why the big jump from 160Gb to 250? DO these drives run hotter or noisier than smaller ones?

2. What's the point in Serial ATA and can I use on drive with this and still have my 80Gb Seagate Barracuda running as a standard IDE second drive?

I'm thinking I could get a lot of music on a 250Gb drive but are these standard drives or what?

[Mr. Wilby]

1) Not sure I really understand the question - do you mean why the big capacity jump? There are HD in between the two I thought: actually, just checked and there don't seem to be in the SATA range. Probably just a marketing thing to start with - there shouldn't be any technical reasons that I can think of (I'm no expert mind you!) that would prevent other capacities.

2) Yes, you understood correctly. You should be able to use the SATA interface and the PATA interface at the same time (or else you'd not be able to connect any CD/DVD/Optical drives :-))

I would buy SATA now if you have the potential to support it. They're getting closer in price every day to PATA (old connector) drives and eventually the old connector will be phased out, so you might as well buy SATA.

HTH

[Stereo Steve]

OK, cheers. I'll go for it, any recommendations as to make? A friend tells me Maxtor are good and the one in my Sky+ box is certainly very quiet.

[Mr. Wilby]

I think they're all much of a muchness TBH, everybody always says that they've had a problem with brand X and swears by brand Y but ultimately I think there's not a lot in it.

I would suggest you check the warranty (try and get one with 3 year - I think most of the major manufacturers do these now).

[gab2001uk]

I have recently purchased a Maxtor external 250GB drive (USB2/Firewire) which I am using as a DVD server, by storing the ISO files on it and mounting with Daemon tools for viewing, or Nero for burning.

It is very quiet, fast and shuts itself off after an hour if not used. Should serve your purpose well, but take care your BIOS / OS can support this size of drive.

[Stereo Steve]

In the end I have ordered a Seagate SATA-150 160Gb drive. It has a noise level of 25db which is nice. At just over £100 it's a bargain.