Hard Drives EIDE or SCSI???

[Cyric]

What's the difference and which is better?

Also what's better between a 7200 or a 10000 HD?

Also I'm planning on building my 1st computer see my post titled system??. I'll be running a Asus A7V MOBO what type of HD will work since I see all types of different pin #'s.

Thanks and sorry for all the lame/dumb questions, trying to learn this stuff.

Cyric

[Edited by Cyric on 04-07-2001 at 05:01 PM]

[OC]

I also have an A7V and it rocks. Good choice. As to hard drives, I can't see spending the extra money on a SCSI drive when you can get very close to the same performance with EIDE drives. I have a 7200 rpm drive for my OS and such, with a slave 5400 rpm drive for mass storage - MP3s and such. Some people have favorite brands, but I've never had any problems with IBM, Fujitsu, or Quantum drives. Frankly I just go for the biggest capacity for the dollar from one of these brands. Sometimes it's just what's on sale.

-OC

[Cyric]

Hey overclocked how do you split up the hard drives where your OS is only on one drive but you can still access the other? Dumb question I'm sure but I gotta know.

Cyric

[OC]

No prob. This is actually a bit of a no brainer, but you gotta learn sometime.

Since you're a newbie, I'll suggest this procedure: (don't forget to jumper the drives correctly throughout this procedure!)

Assemble your system with only one hard drive (the "master" drive). Detect the drive in the BIOS. Fdisk and format the drive, then install the OS.

After the OS is installed, completely unplug the first hard drive. Install your second hard drive, also jumpered as Master. Detect the drive in the BIOS. Fdisk and format the drive.

Rejumper the second drive as Slave, then plug your original Master drive back in. Detect both drivesin the BIOS.

Reboot.

Windows (every version since 95) will automatically recognize the second hard drive and assign it a drive letter. The second hard drive will either be the D: drive or the E: drive, depending. Don't really worry about it at this point. Wait until you get some more experience under your belt, then delve into drive letter assignment.

By having a second drive for basic storage you can do whatever you want to the OS drive and still have all your MP3s, MPEGs, ISO images, etc... safe and immediately available.

-OC

[Justin42]

There are 2 main differences between SCSI and IDE: speed, and number of devices. IDE can only have 2 devices per channel, and SCSI can have up to 16. Save IRQ's if you have a lot of HDs/CD/DVD stuff on your system. Also, SCSI devices tend to be faster, because of better being able to offload I/O operations from the computer's CPU to the SCSI card, as well as most manufacturers seem to put better quality (faster) stuff in SCSI devices. SCSI can be a bit more difficult to set up properly, but that's mainly due to the flexibility. It's nowhere near as bad as it was 10 years ago.

Will you notice a huge difference? Depends on what you do. An all SCSI system under WinNT/2K will absolutely fly. If you only have 1 HD and only surf the web, word process, etc, you will probably never see a major difference. But put 2-3 10K/15K RPM SCSI drives in and it's quite impressive.

And as a parting thought, the one thing I've consistently seen is the anyone who moves from IDE to SCSI never goes back.

(can you tell what side I'm on?