A few questions before buying new HD 2

[Foxglove21]

I am working with an older comp, a compaq presario 5000 with 700MHz Intel Celeron processor,128mb memory, 15gb hd,cd rom, cd-rw 4x4x32, floppy and superdisk drive. I'm thinking about buying a Maxtor 160gb internal hd model L01P160. I hope someone could give me some insite as to if this is a good dirve. Also what kinds of problems I might face installing and using it, and should I even buy it. Please help! TIA!

 

[kestrel1]

Personally I like Maxtor drives. One thing you will have to make sure of before you buy is, can your motherboard's BIOS support such a large hard drive. If it can't, you may be able to flash upgrade your BIOS to enable it to recognise your drive. Take look at your motherboard manufacturers website to determine if you can do this.
Are you going to install this drive as your primary drive & use you old one as a slave. If so you need to make sure that you set the jumpers on both drives correctly.
Once installed the drive will need to be partitioned & formated.

 

[cdogg]

Most motherboards that supported the 700MHz celeron usually do not support drives larger than 137GB. Why? The 137GB barrier is a known issue with the older 28-bit addressing scheme of ATA of the IDE interface. This older interface has the upper limit of 137GB.

For large drives, a 48-bit addressing scheme must be used, which has an upper limit of 144 Petabytes (48,000,000 GB). In order to get 48-bit addressing, you have one of two options:

1) Check to see if your motherboard's vendor has released a BIOS revision to support it. With the limitations in older IDE controllers that didn't even support ATA-100, chances are slim to none that it's possible.

2) Simply install a PCI "add-in" card IDE controller. Some larger hard drives might actually come with one. Just make sure that if you have to purchase one, that it supports 48-bit addressing.


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein

 

[Foxglove21]

Thanks for your help you have both been very informative and helped out greatly. Unfortunaly I am not able upgrade the bios. So I went to compaq for help and got nothing. Although I will most likely buy a Maxtor hard drive I am also looking for some feedback on Seagate hard drives. I'm actually looking at Seagate Barracuda 120.0GB Internal Hard Drive Model# ST3120026A. Please let tell me anything you can about it. TIA!

 

[paparazi]

More reliable and quiter than the Maxtor, seagate Barracuda's have gained an enviable reputation for their solid build and dependability, only thing is they are slightly slower than the 8meg cache Maxtor DiamondMax plus 9 that you first enquired about.
However because you have an older machine, with inherrant bottlenecks caused by older chipset and ram types, the hard drive certainly won't be the cause of any slow downs and fitted in your machine the Maxtor won't have any speed advantage over the Seagate.
Martin


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