PC Upgades

[Bill Zens]

OK, I've got 3-4 upgrades I want to ask about.

First off, part of the reason for the upgrade is I've got a mega project with about 14 hours of video that I want to segregate to a separate HDD. Secondly, some of my hardware is a little old.

I'm currently running two- 250 gb SATA HDD's, connected to the motherboard. I'm looking to add a Western Digital 400 GB HDwith a SATA controller card to the mix. The all knowing, pimply-faced teenagers at Fry's said I could only have two- SATA drives in a system. I assume they were only talking about MB SATA, and not considering adding the controller card. Am I right? I prefer Internal HDD, but am not married to that.

Seeing what I've read about RAID 0/1, I don't see the benefits to me of that setup, and I will not RAID.

What are your recommendations for a decent DVD burner, or should I get a duplicator instead?

More to come(monitors and video cards) later...

Thanks

[Christopher Lefchik]

Originally Posted by Bill Zens

I'm currently running two- 250 gb SATA HDD's, connected to the motherboard. I'm looking to add a Western Digital 400 GB HDwith a SATA controller card to the mix. The all knowing, pimply-faced teenagers at Fry's said I could only have two- SATA drives in a system.

You can add as many drives as your motherboard and add-in cards support (there is probably a limit to how many Windows would support, but it wouldn't be a concern here).

Originally Posted by Bill Zens

I assume they were only talking about MB SATA, and not considering adding the controller card. Am I right? I prefer Internal HDD, but am not married to that.

Probably right, although I question how they would know how many SATA drives your motherboard supports, unless you told them the model. My motherboard, for example, has connections for four SATA hard drives.

Originally Posted by Bill Zens

I prefer Internal HDD, but am not married to that.

Besides external USB/FireWire hard drives, another option would be an external SATA drive. I built one myself a little while back using a plain SATA drive and an Apricorn SATA case. Hard drive vendors are starting to make their own external SATA drives now. LaCie, for example, has the LaCie d2 SATA kit that includes a SATA PCI card. The nice thing about external SATA drives is that they are just as fast as internal drives, owing to the direct SATA connection.

Don't get me wrong. There's nothing wrong at all with internal drives. In fact, they would undoubtedly be the most inexpensive solution. I just wanted to present another option.

Originally Posted by Bill Zens

What are your recommendations for a decent DVD burner, or should I get a duplicator instead?

The answer to that question depends upon how many DVDs you think you will need to duplicate. For what it's worth, you might want to check out the thread we had here recently on building one's own CD/DVD duplicator.

[Glenn Chan]

Couldn't you add a 400GB IDE drive? Or is there no room left for that in your system?

[Pat Sherman]

http://www.cwol.com/serial-ata/esata...i-raid-kit.htm
External SATA Example..

One thing to think about is the performance and possible bottle-necking of the addon SATA Card.. Not saying it will happen but with some NLE's it could pose a problem if the chipset doesn't dig the SATA Add-on card.. You could just upgrade your motherboard to a new one.. Most 945/955/975 intel chipsets for example have 4 SATA ports which can be run in AHCI/ATA or ACHI/RAID or PATA.. I have a couple Lacie 320GB External Firewire Drives and I hate em.. I always get a Windows Delayed write error and this is after 3 Firewire Cards, Onboard Firewire and Ti Drivers and OHCI Drivers.. Bah..

[Christopher Lefchik]

Originally Posted by Pat Sherman

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One thing to think about is the performance and possible bottle-necking of the addon SATA Card.. Not saying it will happen but with some NLE's it could pose a problem if the chipset doesn't dig the SATA Add-on card..

This reminded me of a potential problem I should have mentioned. If you are using an editing card like the Matrox RT.X100 which utilizes the PCI bus heavily, an add-in IDE or SATA PCI card is not a good idea.