Looking to get a 1TB SATA drive but need advice

[MAAD]

Ok, first off, I'm not a tech expert so please bear with me.

I have an older machine that still works great but I'd like to upgrade my drive. I currently have a machine with an ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe MB with 2 120GB ATA133 drives. I'm looking at replacing one with a 1TB SATA drive (since the MB can run SATA) but I noticed that the MB specs say "SATA 1.5 Gb/s". Is there any way to achieve the 3.0Gb/s that the drive is capable of with this motherboard? Can I get a SATA card that can make the machine capable of hitting 3.0Gb/s? Or should I just buy a new machine altogether?

Thanks,
MAAD

 

[Rob Williams]

Welcome to the forums

S-ATA 3Gb/s is backwards-compatible with 1.5Gb/s, so any drive you plug in is going to work. Some drives require a small switch on the drive itself to be toggled in order to enable 1.5Gb/s, so you might just want to look out for that. As for 3.0Gb/s... I wouldn't worry about getting a separate card just to enable that operation. It will make no difference whatsoever in the the real-world. 1.5Gb/s equals 150MB/s, and even the fastest hard drives on the market right now don't exceed 110MB/s read (the fastest SSD's are around 250MB/s read). Most 1TB drives are under 100MB/s, so you have little to worry about.

 

[Krazy K]

Rob said it well. You will never get close to the capability of S-ATA throughput. As for which brand...they're all the same to most extent. Some have longer warranties and some are louder. I don't think Rob will mind if I make a plug for Tech Report, but head over there and find one that has speeds and power and noise levels that interest you. Keep an eye out for rebates too.

 

[Merlin]

Rob said it well. You will never get close to the capability of S-ATA throughput. As for which brand...they're all the same to most extent. Some have longer warranties and some are louder. I don't think Rob will mind if I make a plug for Tech Report, but head over there and find one that has speeds and power and noise levels that interest you. Keep an eye out for rebates too.

Rebates??
I could never understand ( or is it, I want to )
And Coupons?
It's been a while but, I was suppose to get 100.00 USD back from a purchase, and all I got was coupons ( I think it was CREATIVE INC ) to buy more Creative products.
Since that I don't care for rebates or mail-in rebates.
The best thing they could do is take the rebate off right then.
I got a new phone from Sprint with a 100.00 mail in rebate, Never sent it in....
Now I dont even look at rebates, if it is a fair price I get it and that's it....no mailing crap off and waiting 6 to 8 weeks to get it back

Just a few cents worth for now

Merlin

 

[Rob Williams]

I've never sent in a rebate either, but it would be useful to those who are purchasing an entire PC at once and have a couple rebates from it that total a good chunk of change. After all, it's your money, essentially, so if you have the ambition to spend a stamp on mailing it in, it might just pay off. I personally would never go after a product because of the rebate though, because there's no-telling if you'll actually receive the discount or not.

I have zero experience in this though, so I can't speak fact.

 

[Krazy K]

I used to feel the same way about rebates. Always sent them in and never got anything back but in the last 2 years I must be 15 for 15. It still is a gamble and I don't see why they just don't discount the price at the register but I think that's what they bank on. Send it in filled out correctly and make a photocopy for yourself and you should be golden.

Think of it this way. You pay the same price for 2 cards, but in 6-8 weeks when the price drops on one of the cards the manufacturer feels bad he overcharged you and decides to refund some of the purchase price.

 

[Rob Williams]

15 for 15, really? That's impressive. I would never mail one in and actually expect a rebate, so it's good to know my assumptions are unfounded. What I do find a little odd is that these companies still want "mail-in" rebates. What's wrong with scanning and faxing it? It would speed up the entire process. Sure, things could be Photoshopped, but things could just as easily be Photoshopped and then printed out, to mail-in.

Just strikes me odd to MAIL something in when dealing with computer equipment, heh.

 

[Kougar]

I don't do rebates as much as I used to, because what is the point of a $5 rebate when you spend 50 cents in postage, buy an envelope, and spend $ on both ink and paper to print it? Or gas as well, if you must drive to the post office. More like a $2 rebate after all that. If you wanted to be absurdly technical, there is also the time value of money to factor in, but for $5 that's getting silly.

Anyway I always got my rebates back. I only remember one I never heard from again. Or there was one time I sent in the wrong UPC... they sent me a notecard letting me know it was the wrong UPC and gave a week extension, but I didn't have the package anymore at that point. Believe it or not I've twice mailed in rebates 1-7 days after the postage marked deadline and I still got my checks.

Rob, since you mentioned it, about half of the rebates I did for last Black Friday involved an online registration. You can enter most or all of the info online, monitor your rebate status, and be notified by email when they mail your check an absurd 6 months later. Just have to send in the UPC and sales receipt.

 

[madmat]

A small bit of advice to consider is that the 1tb drives are experiencing a few growing pains right now. I can't remember which company but one of them recalled some of their 1tb drives due to data corruption issues. Honestly, you'll see faster read and write times with a pair of 500gig drives in RAID -0 and it'll end up being cheaper in the long run. Just something to consider.

 

[Merlin]

A small bit of advice to consider is that the 1tb drives are experiencing a few growing pains right now. I can't remember which company but one of them recalled some of their 1tb drives due to data corruption issues. Honestly, you'll see faster read and write times with a pair of 500gig drives in RAID -0 and it'll end up being cheaper in the long run. Just something to consider.

I dunno, I got a WD Green 1 TB drive from Fry's for 99.00, the 500 gig drives were 106.00

 

[Rob Williams]

For speed and space, you could just pick up two 1TB drives and RAID them. Storage is SO cheap nowdays, so there's no reason to not have some sort of redundancy. That reminds me... I need to hurry up and go pick up a 1TB drive before I regret it. Re-ripped over 300 albums so far, and I really don't want my computer to blow up before I get a chance to back them up.

I got a WD Green 1 TB drive from Fry's for 99.00

That's a damn good price. I'm quite interested in that drive... low power and lower temps intrigues me.

 

[MAAD]

Hey guys. I had seen the first few responses but I misplaced this page before I could respond myself. Sorry for the long delay.

Anyway, thanks for the advice. I really appreciated it. I ended up getting a new OEM 1TB drive for $89.99 at Amazon. A couple of days after I ordered it, the price went up a good $7 so I lucked out (saved $7 without dealing with a rebate! Woohoo! lol).

Again, thanks for the advice guys.

MAAD

 

[Rob Williams]

That's a steal, grats on the purchase!

 

[N64000]

Sorry to bump-in, but i have exactly the same mainboard as you MAAD and also want to get one or two 1TB drives.

My question is, considering it's an older mb, is it recognized in bios? (in a size matter)

Have you put it in, how does it work?

 

[Merlin]

If BIOS sees the drive but the OS does not, then you need to go into administration tools in Control Panel and format the drive.
Make sure all physical connections are secure on the mobo and power connections

 

[N64000]

Thanks for fast reply!

I know about disk management tool and how everything should be done there.

But this is the thing: i had an older comp a while ago (1GHz, 512MB SDRAM, Intel mainboard,....) and two 250GB HDDs. Under OS (WinXP) after activation and formatting both drives, they appeared to work ok. In BIOS however, they were recognized, but only as 136GB HDDs.

So that's what i'm concerned about here, will those 1TB drives be recognized as full 1000GB in BIOS or less. I'm aware it may not mean much if they work fine under OS, but still bugs me.

I've also installed latest version of BIOS but it says nothing about HDDs in description.

I'm hoping for MAAD's reply how it went for him, since we have the same MB (P4P800-E Deluxe). If it works perfect in BIOS and OS, then i'll buy 20 of them!

 

[Doomsday]

i have been looking at signatures and see that apart from the 1TB or 320GB or 500GB HDDs u have a small 120 or 150 GB HDDs like WD Raptors or Velociraptors etc. What r these small ones for?!? i know they r around 10,000RPMs though.

 

[Merlin]

i have been looking at signatures and see that apart from the 1TB or 320GB or 500GB HDDs u have a small 120 or 150 GB HDDs like WD Raptors or Velociraptors etc. What r these small ones for?!? i know they r around 10,000RPMs though.

They are fast hard drives, now up to 300 gigs
Good for using as main hard drive for faster booting OS

 

[N64000]

I did a heavy research and finally found just the thing i was looking for at asus forums.

Since BIOS and OS supports 48-bit LBA, in theory system can "see" HDD size up to 140 petabytes!!

Here is the link: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...&model=P4P800-E+Deluxe&page=1&SLanguage=en-us if anyone else is wondering about that too. There is also some more useful info there.

 

[Merlin]

I did a heavy research and finally found just the thing i was looking for at asus forums.

Since BIOS and OS supports 48-bit LBA, in theory system can "see" HDD size up to 140 petabytes!!

Here is the link: http://vip.asus.com/forum/view.aspx...&model=P4P800-E+Deluxe&page=1&SLanguage=en-us if anyone else is wondering about that too. There is also some more useful info there.

A petabyte (derived from the SI prefix peta- ) is a unit of information or computer storage equal to approximately one quadrillion bytes, or 1024 terabytes. It is commonly abbreviated PB. When used with byte multiples, the prefix may indicate a power of either 1000 or 1024, so the exact number may be either

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