Mixing Hard Drive Brands in same PC

Question

My brother has an E510 Dimension with an OCZ 500 watt power supply and Nvidia 7900GT video card. He currently has the original 80gb Seagate hard drive as the main drive with no backup. The 80gb has been a little feisty lately, so he wants it replaced before it toasts itself and he loses his files.   The question we have is this:   I have 2 SATA drives on my 'parts bin' shelf and he'd like them installed instead of the little 80GB drive. One is a Western Digital 320gb SATA which he'd like for his main drive, and he also wants my Seagate 500gb SATA drive as a backup. I generally only will keep same brand drives in the same PC, but he's a 'poor' college student and doesn't want to have to buy another drive.   Has anyone here experienced any problems mixing 2 different brand SATA hard drives in the same PC?   Years ago, I had a Seagate (main) and a Western Digital (slave) IDE drives in my old Dell 4600 and for some reason, the read/write speeds between the 2 were very slow. I finally switched out the WD for a Seagate in that PC, and both the Seagates reading and writing sped up considerably.

tr4 · Answer

No problem mixing drives. The early ide drives did have some odd compatability issues but that seems long gone. Nice of you to give him your drives. Poor college students don't need 800gb of drives LOL

shesagordie · Answer

Razorback777

I've been using a mix of Seagate and Western Digital SATA hard drives in an Inspiron 530 for a year without any problems.

Bev.

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shesagordie · Answer

tr4

Sorry for the cut, it was not intended. :(

Bev.

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Post the issue in the appropriate Board, where they will be answered.

Razorback777 · Answer

TR4... He may be a poor student, but still the same, I'd prefer him storing his own files on a backup instead of him always asking me for my external to store his stuff. :smileywink: He keeps everything from his music collection and DVD's on there as well as his homework and other junk. In fact, maybe I should get him an external enclosure for the storage drive.... hmmmm

Also... shesagordie, thanks for the reply. I was hoping that the SATA drives had made some improvements over the IDE's in some way. I also figured that since SATA's basically run on their own channel, that also would make quite the speed difference over the 2 drives being on the same cable like the IDE's.

Now I just hope I can somehow Ghost his entire main drive including the restore partition onto the new main drive. That in itself will save alot of time when trying to reinstall the OS and all the programs he has

Storage, Drives & Media

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