What Should I buy

[Nerwin]

Well i'm buying a hard drive for my new computer and just wandering what i should buy.

I want a SATA but Should i get a ATA I don't know the Difference can some one tell me whats the Difference and show me a picture of the connector type. That would be a big help.

P.S: This is my first time building a computer so might be asking a few questions so don't be rough on me.

[Zxian]

Well... first off you don't need a poll, and this should probably go under the hardware section of the forum.

In terms of performance, you probably won't see much of a difference between SATA and PATA (which is the alternative) with today's hard drives. One of the advantages of SATA, however, is the fact that the cables are smaller and each drive is on its own channel. To explain that a bit, PATA drives (the old wide cables) could be piggy-backed, where you would have two drives connected to one channel on the motherboard. However, only one of the drives could be accessed at any one time. With SATA, each drive is always on its own channel, and therefore can always be accessed.

As for the size - that all depends on you. How much space do you think you'll need? What kind of data are you going to be storing? Videos, music, pictures, or just documents? There's no point in buying a 300GB drive if you're just going to be storing text files.

[Nerwin]

Well i'm going to be storing Videos, Music, Pictures and all kind of stuff so i would like a 160gig but i may buy a 120 gig instead but i don't know yet.

[Jeremy]

If you can afford the 160 and it's by a reputable maker then I'd probably go with that. If you're going to have several different filetypes you might want to consider using partitions for each type. I've heard it helps the HD last longer. Actually, it was Zxian who told me that. lol