HD sata convert

[Crindle]

Okay recentley I did a purchase at newegg and got the wrong pin of ddr2 3200 ram and also a 320gb sata hard drive. Is there a way to convert a sata drive to a normal one with the big ribbon as a slave? How can I use two hard drives to make a computer run faster used for picture, listing programs, and ebay?

Also does the voltage and cas latency on ram matter alot or no?

Thanks,
The noob Crindle.

 

[attrofy]

If your not overclocking, or running a top speed machine, CAS Latency is probably not to big of an issue for you. The lower the number, the better, but it comes at a price. THe decision isyours where performance and budget cross paths. Based on your intended use, I don't think the difference in CAS latency between 3 and 2.5 is going to matter too much. Voltages are numbers to help determine overclocking multiplier. Again, something you won't have to worry about unless you are trying to squeeze out every last performance number of an over clocked rig.

As for the Hard Drive issue, the best performance gain for you is going to be buying an adapter card that goes into one of your PCI slots. This will have the proper connectors to plug your SATA drive into. One of the cards on this page:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...=&Description=pci+sata&Submit=ENE&N=0&Ntk=all

will probably work for you. You didn't specify if this is SATA I or Sata II - basically, 150 MB/S or 300 MB/s. In a nut shell, this is the peak transfer rate of the hard drive to the system bus. Even though SATA II is faster, this is not a sustained rate, and SATA I is sufficient for todays capabilities, as you will nmost likely never take advantage of the burst transfer rates from SATA II - at least not with todays technology anyway. In the future that will hopefully change, but for now, SATA I is sufficient. If you have a SATA II drive, it will kick down to SATA I speeds if you have a SATA I controller. Like USB, they are backwards compatible.

For your uses, ebay, pictures, etc, your most noticable speed increases will be anything that contributes to the BUS speed bottom line. It will most likely not be significantly noticable with most add-on parts as the limiting factor will be your Motherboard - processor - memory combo. Memory will always be a good investment, especially when working with images, and will help speed up photoshop times.

One of the options you do have is to partition your hard drive. This will allow you a small section on the hard drive to keep "transfering" files. This way any of the things you need to sort through, or retreive will be confined in a smaller space, so the HDD won't have to access teh entire 320GB - it can acces say only a 20gb - 30gb partition. This really won't help in much except for the indexing of the drive - which can speed up some listings and searches.

There are some ways to speed up your system, but many of them might be considered "extreeme". New HDD will increase the speed, but the OS would have to be reinstalled, and the price of the Western Digital Raptors may not be considered a good buy considering the price per GB compared to some other manufacturers.

These are my opinions, and there is more then one way to skin a cat. So if you post back some specifics of what you are looking for, or what you are willing to spend or willing to do for upgrades, we can give more specific advice.