what is my hard drive? - Club CDFreaks

mmz87 · 31-07-2002

I've been wanting to upgrade my hard drive. It's a crappy 5 year old 3.2 gig. So I've been looking at hard drives but I have a problem. How do I know what kind my mobo can have? ATA 33/66/100? UDMA or DMA and all that kinda stuff. So I was wandering if there is any utilitie I can get to check, or if I have to look at my mobo or hard drive or something. Thx for any info.

*Mr. Belvedere* · 01-08-2002

In your manual and on the manufacturers website is the chipset named of your motherboard. This gives a pretty good indication what your system can handle.

Mind you that all ATA styles are backwards compatible , so it won't hurt to have an ATA 133 on a ATA 66 bus.

83bj60 · 01-08-2002

Like Mr. Belvedere said, the drives are backwsard compatible to your MOBO's ATA speed. Mine is about the same age as yours and it's an ATA-33 and I recently installed a 80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA 100 in it, of course it is limited to ATA 33 transfer speeds.

One thing you may have to consider is that your MOBO may not support hard drives larger than 64GB without third party utilities and that it may not perform as good as expected with very large hard drives. I say this based on my own experience: I tried a 60GB Maxtor in my machine prior to the Seagate and athough it was really loud (the reason why I returned it - the Seagate is wondeful in that respect in that it can hardly be heard) it seemed to be a speed demon compared to my 80BG Seagate. This has also been vconfirmed to me by my buddy who builds computers for a living, he says for upgrades 40GB 7200RPM UATA-100 and 133 hard drives provide best performance.

In other words, yes you will have most probably no problems upgrading your hard disk (Norton Ghost is great for making it painless if you don't want to reeinstall everything) but the perfomance inscrease, however significant, may not be as dramatic on your motherboard as expected.

One last thing, get yourself a new 80 conductor cable if your motherboard supports it. Poor cables can cause slow performance and you may not realise it.

HTH...

31-07-2002	#1 (permalink)
mmz87 CD Freaks Member Join Date: Mar 2002 Posts: 118	what is my hard drive? I've been wanting to upgrade my hard drive. It's a crappy 5 year old 3.2 gig. So I've been looking at hard drives but I have a problem. How do I know what kind my mobo can have? ATA 33/66/100? UDMA or DMA and all that kinda stuff. So I was wandering if there is any utilitie I can get to check, or if I have to look at my mobo or hard drive or something. Thx for any info.

01-08-2002	#2 (permalink)
Mr. Belvedere CDFreaks Resident Join Date: Jun 2001 Location: married Posts: 14,682	In your manual and on the manufacturers website is the chipset named of your motherboard. This gives a pretty good indication what your system can handle. Mind you that all ATA styles are backwards compatible , so it won't hurt to have an ATA 133 on a ATA 66 bus. __________________ I might be evil. Want to make dvd movie backups? Take the 5-step or the 2-step process. Fun, fast and free!

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01-08-2002	#3 (permalink)
83bj60 CD Freaks Senior Member Join Date: Apr 2002 Location: Canada Posts: 389	Like Mr. Belvedere said, the drives are backwsard compatible to your MOBO's ATA speed. Mine is about the same age as yours and it's an ATA-33 and I recently installed a 80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA 100 in it, of course it is limited to ATA 33 transfer speeds. One thing you may have to consider is that your MOBO may not support hard drives larger than 64GB without third party utilities and that it may not perform as good as expected with very large hard drives. I say this based on my own experience: I tried a 60GB Maxtor in my machine prior to the Seagate and athough it was really loud (the reason why I returned it - the Seagate is wondeful in that respect in that it can hardly be heard) it seemed to be a speed demon compared to my 80BG Seagate. This has also been vconfirmed to me by my buddy who builds computers for a living, he says for upgrades 40GB 7200RPM UATA-100 and 133 hard drives provide best performance. In other words, yes you will have most probably no problems upgrading your hard disk (Norton Ghost is great for making it painless if you don't want to reeinstall everything) but the perfomance inscrease, however significant, may not be as dramatic on your motherboard as expected. One last thing, get yourself a new 80 conductor cable if your motherboard supports it. Poor cables can cause slow performance and you may not realise it. HTH...

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