Which HDD?

Felix Unger

I was thinking of going for a Maxtor, as they seem to be the only
manufacturer supporting ATA133 atm, so seeing as the mobo supports it I thought I'd try it. Any opinions?

DiamondMax+ D740X 80GB UDMA133

I was intending partitioning it into 2 30GBs for FAT32 and a 20GB NTFS Win2000 test partition. (Still running 98 SE as main OS)


IrishByte - The only limitation is with FAT32, it's recommended not to have partitions above 32GB as it adversely affects performance
and wastes storage space when storing small files. All this is from memory as in work at the moment so I could be wrong on that.

JustHalf

ATA/133 is overrated. Most drives never even exceed the UDMA-33 limits, let alone UDMA-66 or ATA/100.

My advice would be to look around for the fastest drive in your price range rather than whether or not it had ATA/133. Unless you want a storage capacity greater than 137Gigs.

The fastest IDE drives at the moment are the WD Special Editions. I have the 80Gig version myself, and I am quite impressed by the speed increase it gave me in general windows use. WD-Tach thinks it's 33% faster on average than my 40Gig Quantum Fireball AS.

byte

Originally posted by JustHalf
The fastest IDE drives at the moment are the WD Special Editions. I have the 80Gig version myself, and I am quite impressed by the speed increase it gave me in general windows use. WD-Tach thinks it's 33% faster on average than my 40Gig Quantum Fireball AS.

Now that's what I like to hear:p Mine didn't come today but maybe tomorrow. My current HDD is a 10GB Quantum too and it's terribly noisy and slow.

Pepe LeFrits

I have a Quantum Fireball 40gb (nearly a year old), a Western Digital caviar 40gb (6 months old) and a 8gb IBM (4 years old). All working and have worked flawlessly since i got them. And that's all I have to add to this thread.

byte

Well my new WD HDD came last Wednesday but it's sitting idle at the moment as it won't work as slave with my Quantum. After much swearing I managed to get the drive partitioned and formatted but only on its own as Master. I noticed 5 pairs of jumper pins on WD but only 4 pairs on Quantum. 3 of the pairs on Quantum was S/CS/M. The WD on the other hand had an option "Master with Slave present" so I guess the Q don't have this option and my WD will have to be Master.

I'd still expect my PC to boot though with the 2 connected but it doesn't . Anyway, either way, the WD is staying as it's extremely quiet. All I need now is to put software on it!

OT: how do I enter DOS from startup? Which button must I press? I assume its one of the function buttons.

JustHalf

F8 will do the trick.