Bman™ said:
I have been looking to buy a new harddrive. I might have found one that I want. It is a 120gb Maxtor hardrive, I do not know much about harddrives. I was wondering about SATA/150, this harddrive has this at the end of the name. I do not know what this is, I think its the speed. If so, I heard that it's only compatible with some motherboards. How do I know if mine is....
Thanks
Well, instead of a Maxtor HDD, I'd go for Seagate or Western Digital. I've had bad experiences with the Maxtor HDDs: far too sensitive for shocks. Once I did some maintenance stuff to my PC and took out the HDDs (carefully, of course). I didn't even bounce at anything or whatever and when I put them back in, the Maxtor HDD died suddenly, while it was only 6 months old. >_o
So yeah, if you are a capacity freak, you might want to go for Seagate's 200 GB SATA HDD, although you could go for the Ultra ATA 100 version, as there won't be much difference, because of the drive's capacity and its 8.5 ns seeking time (never got changed compared to the smaller drives, which doesn't make sense, but meh). Will save you at least $50.
If you aim for performance, you could try Western Digital's Raptor HDDs: 10,000 RPM on SATA interface. Sweet stuff, I tell you.
Or you could just be simple and get a regular, but big, Seagate or WD HDD (120 or 160 GB). Just have a look around on review sites. I recommend
www.anandtech.com and
www.tomshardware.com
Good luck!
Edit: To answer your question about motherboard compatibility: I don't know what motherboard you have, but use Google to find its official specs. Use search terms like this:
[your motherboard's name/model] specs
- or -
[your motherboard's name/model] specifications
It should list what interfaces it supports.