Help with second hard drive

[raw1982]

Ok just got adsl and within about a week my 40gig is full. So i have been looking around at hard drives and decided that i want to go for a IBM 80gig 120GXP, is this a wise decision?
Another question i have is that all my IDE ports are taken up, I have cd-writer, dvd rom, hard disk and a zip disk, my motherboard is an ECS K7S5A what is the best option for me to do because i am completely new to all this. Do i need a PCI IDE Controller and if so can anyone recommend me one. Also what is a RAID controller would this make things quicker or is this only for networking? What are my options?

 

[thirdeye]

if you look some of the higher capacity maxtors will come bundled w/ an ata133 controller. thats how i picked up my 80gb drive.

as for the IBM drive, i've never owned one. i've always had good luck with Maxtor

 

[MisterDuck]

I'd be wary of buying IBM drives....their last few models (75 and 60GXP) were not the most reliable beasts....if I were you, I'd go with a maxtor, seagate, or western digital.

You're going to have to get an additional IDE controller (a PCI one) to add any more IDE devices to your system. RAID doesn't have anything to do with networking; it stands for Redundant Array of Independant (or Inexpensive) Drives, and it basically allows you to either safeguard your data by mirroring the data between two drives, or increase speed by splitting the data. You can also do both (split the data and mirror it) but it starts getting complicated and pricey (since you need more drives). It *could* make things quicker, but I don't think for your case it would make a big difference.

If I were you, I would buy an IDE controller card and a cheap maxtor or seagate drive (the seagates are very quiet). ALthough the IBM is *slightly* faster, the difference is so nominal that I doubt you'll notice anything.
Cheers.

 

[Dan]

I'd also recommend staying away from an IBM HDD. As MisterDuck noted, some of their recent models have been less than reliable. Given IBM's new releationship with Hitachi, I'd go with a Western Digital, Seagate or Maxtor instead.

 

[hopeless879]

I'd go with one of the larger maxtors that give you the card with it. Save you some money. IBM has had alot of problems with their drives lately but ive never owned one, so I wont comment on that.

 

[crazychicken]

i recently purchased an IBM 120gxp 60gb. is the 120 series better? or do they have lots of problems too? i didn't see anything mentioned about this particular model in this thread.

thanks
david

 

[LordAccord]

Ive heard bad things about all of them... and I have 2 60gxps in a raid 0 array.... its asking for trouble. Ive had the array not boot a couple of times, Im frankly just waiting for the day that one of those babies crashes on me....

Why not go with one of the WD 80gb or 120gb in the jb series with 8mb cache, supposedly they are supposed to be great!

LoRdAccord

 

[raw1982]

Ok thanks for the help everybody. will stay away from IBM's, for an extra £10 i can get a 80GB seagate 7200 so i will get that one. Also can i get any PCI IDE controller or are some better than others. can anybody recommend a good one.
thanks

 

[raw1982]

Can anyone explain why these controller cards are hard to find?

 

[crazychicken]

i have a Maxtor/Promise ATA 100 controller i can sell ya

you can pretty much name your price, i've been trying to get rid of it for a while

lmk

david

 

[raw1982]

i live in the uk