[Bobboau]

lately I've been thinking I would realy like some more storage space, and I'd rather not chuck out an exsisting hard drive for it, so I've been thinking about getting a PCI IDE controler card.

so... any recomendations?

[Drew]

iv got an ATA card sitting in my box right now. i tore it out of my old gateway(5 years old, had 6 pci slots) and stuck it into my new gateway because the new one only had 1 IDE slot. Anyway, its been working like a charm for 5 years running both CD drives at once.

[Liberator]

Accept no substitutes, buy a Promise Technology controller.

That'll be 4 new channels for ya.

[Omniscaper]

Why not go serial ata? Next gen tech and smaller cables. Higher if not comparable to ultra ata 133mhz bus speeds. There are adapters that will allow the use of your old ide HD.

[Bobboau]

hmmm, thats a good idea, what are the price diferences? and do I need specal formatting or something?
I was actualy just looking at that.

[ChronoReverse]

Only things really different right now are slightly higher prices and a different cable (you can get an adaptor, I believe, to go from parallel to serial).

[Omniscaper]

Serial ata has the highest data bandwidth short of a scsi HD. The Serial ata HD's are a tad more expensive. The serial ata controllers are basically the same price as ide controllers depending on how many channels you want. Seagate HD's I can vouch for reliability and speed. Just make sure that your case is ventilated enough to handle 7200rpms or highr.  I'm actually researching info and prices for a serial ata RAID setup for my video editing rig. Checkout pricewatch.com

[Omniscaper]

Of course all this bandwidth is useless unless your tasks involve massive data transfers. With video editing I need all the bandwidth I can get short of killing my budget with SCSI HD's.

[Bobboau]

I could use the extra bandwidth, it isn't as critical as it is to you, but I would still benifit (I do rendering some times with huge freaking textures, compileing would probly go faster)

[ChronoReverse]

Erm, compiling (as in program compiling) isn't going to benefit much from faster harddrives.

First of all, continuous transfer rates of harddrives don't even saturate ATA100's 100MB/s much less Serial ATA's 150MB/s.

Secondly compiling is most definitely cpu-bounded.



Now, if you really want more bandwidth from your harddrives, I recommend a RAID serial controller.  If you don't mind putting your data at risk (I suppose you can use this just for the system drives), then RAID-0 will give you a nice boost.



Hmmm, I hear that the NF3-250 chipset will feature built-in RAID 0+1 as well the ability to mix SerialATA and ParallelATA.  I hope it turns out to be a good performer...

[Liberator]

Most of the benches I've seen, and granted it's not many as I haven't been looking, show that, in most cases with the modern IDE drives versus SATA, only a modest gain in speed is attained.  The data is still getting choked at the HDD level.  The drives just aren't fast enough to feed the brute processors everybody's got.  

Basically, if you want to future-proof this comp, buy Serial ATA.  If you'll probably build another one when this one starts to show it's age, buy IDE.

[Omniscaper]

If  compiling is your heaviest task, just concentrate on HD speed. You can use Ultra-IDE or Serial-ATA. The difference is 20mb bandwidth. The faster the rpm's the more it can read and write data a second. I've yet to see a non SCSI HD write data as fast as it can send it to the CPU. I recommend 7200 rpm minimum. 10,000 rpm runs like a dream but it gets hot rediculously fast. I would assume 15k rpm is insane!. Serial-ATA is cool because it's tiny cable doesn't contribute to bad air circulation which is important when you go beyond 7200 rpm.

Rendering just requires brute CPU muscle while the HD waits for the data.

If you have 2 or more HD's, serial-ata is good because its smally cables make your PC interior less congested as well. Remember that IDE cables are space hoggers.

[Bobboau]

I use round IDE cables

[Omniscaper]

Cool!!! I recall seeing those in Radioshack. In that case just stick with a fast HD and an extra IDE controller. If you want to push it a step further, get a raid controller so that your second HD can be used more efficiently (2 hard drives treated as one). I've read about raid nightmare stories but ,I've yet to experience data loss.

[ChronoReverse]

Here's a cheap (and somewhat dangerous) way to make your own rounded parallel ide cables.

Take standard ide cable.  Split all the wires into individual wires.  Tie them up.

[Bobboau]

but then they won't look as cool (and it looks like there shielded)

[ChronoReverse]

Meh, it isn't too hard to get some tubing and shroud the cables.  Or even better, use Teflon tape and wrap the suckers.