Choosing your Hard Drive(s)
Submitted by jeffheaton on Wed, 01/09/2008 - 14:20
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There are three different types of hard drives that you can choose from.
- Serial ATA
- IDE
- SCSI
These drives are summarized in Table 1-5.
Table 1-5: Hard Drive types
| Drive Type | Description |
| Serial ATA | The latest hard drive type. A good choice if you want the latest technology on your computer system. |
| IDE | Has been around for a long time, and is very fast. IDE will deliver the speed needed for general use computers as well as gaming machines. |
| SCSI | Very fast hard drive type for many simultaneous accesses. A good choice for server computers. |
Serial ATA is the newer standard. It will likely, eventually, replace IDE drives. Serial ATA drives are considerably faster than IDE. They also cost more than IDE drives.
IDE drives can deliver great performance, and will work fine in just about any computer system. However, if you want to use the latest technology, SATA drives will give a noticeable speed boost when loading data from the hard drive.
