Hard drive connections?

Question

What are the different hard drive connections and what are those particular HD's used for?

I have used the older HD's with their respective connections and I recently added two newer HDs with a smaller thin data cable; I have them setup as an array. It all works but I don't understand it.

Answer 1

The "older" one you mention is probably IDE (ATA100) which is a parallel interface - which just means that many bits of data are being transfered to your hard drive all at once on a wide ribbon cable. The problem with these is they had speed limitations because of all the parallel wires in the cable and the capacitance caused by that type of cable - in this case only 66 to 100MB per second. These cables actually have 40 conductors but have 80 wires - 1 ground wire between each signal wire to allow faster speeds.

The other hard drive connection with the thin data cable is Serial ATA which uses higher speed serial data which means one bit at a time at a much higher speed. SATA150 can transfer up to 150MB per second and SATA 3.0 can transfer up to 3GB per second (about 300MB per second).

If you set these up in a RAID Array (RAID1), you can actually write to both drives at the same time and go twice as fast. If you want to learn more about RAID, look on Wikipedia.

The final common hard drive connection is USB for an external hard drive. USB 2.0 can transfer 480Mbit per second which is about 60MB per second which is slower than the internal connections - but much more convienent.

Answer 2

Most hard drives on the market use an IDE connector. Usually a white connetor about 3/4" long with four heavy wires going into it.

Newer hard drives use a smaller, usually black and flat connector called SATA. Use to be that the "slowest" part of a hard drive was the "seek" time - the kength it took to locate a file on the hard drive itself. Now that seek time has been improved, the slowest part was becoming transfer speed. The SATA is a newer technology which allows for faster transfer rates too and from the drive. It can transfer more information per second then could IDE.

There is also SCSI, still found in Apple computers. Often used in server arrays, because IDE and SATA can only handle two devices at a time. SCSI can handle seven devices. But because it required more configuring then IDE (which is plug and play) it never caught on.

You will also find USB drives, but those are external to the PC.

Answer 3

You are probably refering to IDE and SATA. SATA is the latest hard drive technology for consumers. It uses one thin cable instead of that fat ribbon cable that PATA drives use.
Both are IDE
SATA = Serial ATA
PATA = Parallel ATA

Higher end computers use SCSI Hard Disks. They are higher performance than SATA but more expensive. They will also need their own SCSI controller. The higher end SCSI drives spin at 15,000RPM. They aren't typically used in standard PC's becuase of the higher cost and another reason is the noise level.

Hope this clears things up

Answer 4

Your pc has a SATA difficultpersistent. The old one with pins became into IDE or PATA difficult disk. So, discover any workstation close to you and in simple terms connect the difficult disk using sata cables interior the cupboard. in the adventure that your sata cable is broken then you definately can borrow one out of your chum for some time.