Originally posted by: RMSistight
Originally posted by: Apex
http://www.bestbargainpc.com/index.asp?PageAction=VIEWPROD&ProdID=2284
WD version, OEM. $93, free ship. 3 year warranty.
Not Serial ATA II.
So? There's not that many of those drives out there, and the ones that are, still haven't gotten that close to things like the Raptor. If you want it for technology improvement things like NCQ/TCQ, then you can get that even in drives that aren't SATA II (not that its made all that much differance in most of the tests I've seen). If you want hot swap, well all SATA supports that supposedly, its just that windows doesn't like you pulling hdds out, so thats a software issue. If you are thinking speed, generally its not the interface speed holding things back, its usually the actual drive mechanics that is the bottleneck. They often improve much more slowly over time than the interface does. Its nice to have the headroom in the interface if you are looking to buy a motherboard though.
Take a loot at the Raptors sustained transfer rate. A bit above 70 megs/sec in the begining of the disk. Now even if you need twice that for bursts, SATA's 150 MB speed should handle it just fine. The SATA II drives I've seen usually hit around 60 megs/sec in the begining of the disk for transfer rates.
If its price you want, I like the 160 gig SATA for $40 AR this week
It just depends on your needs. If you need big hdds, this thread is a decent size one. There's larger of course, 400 gigs etc. If you need speed and dont want to pay for SCSI, well the 74g Raptor is the fastest non scsi hdd out there. If you want cheap SATA, the 25 cents a gig drive on sale this week is the way to go.