4100 adding SATA WD2500JB drive

you will have to buy a SATA Pci card

Slower than what? The bottleneck is the slow 7200 rpm rotation, not the drive interface - whether you use a SATA card or not, the limtation is the 60-65 MBps the drive can deliver to the interface, not the interface to PC bandwidth.

Will a SATA Pci card make this drive much slower?

You pay more for the Raptor, because it's an Enterprise-class drive that's built to tighter tolerances and performs better than the 7200 rpm desktop-class drives.

10K IS mainstream for high performance systems - workstations and servers. 15K is high end there and 7200 is all but unheard of except in budget servers.

I have a 6 year old, 700 MHz Athlon system that came standard with same speed drive as a brand-new 3.8 GHz Dell does - the processor market has forged ahead while the hard drive industry has improved capacity by leaps and bounds, while performance remains stagnant.

The reason you don't see more 10K drives is more political/economic than technical - Seagate, Maxtor, and Hitachi all have server-drive businesses to protect. They're not about to ignite a price war with WD and pre-empt that business (if you think the Raptor is expensive, price some 10-15K SCSI units).

If you want higher performance, buy a 10K drive - yes, it costs more. An nVidia 7800 card costs more than a 5200, too.

Ok people this drive is just for music only and I am now looking for options on SATA Pci cards I can get, this link is one I have found http://www.ppa-usa.com/product_pages/sata.htm
I do not have USB 2.0 so does anyone know of a card with both options and even maybe Firewire included?

Also found this one for $55 at Newegg
http://www.koutech.com/proddetail.asp?linenumber=199
any suggestions on other options here people??? I am looking at adding a DVD burner also and thinking the NEC 2540 also looking for suggestive comments on this.

Any SATA controller will run the drive just fine. I would go with newegg or zipzoomfly.com, before TigerDirect, which isn't in the same league as the others, reputation-wise.

this is a SATA card,http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1070711&CatId=1455

This is a USB/Firewire card
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=714164&CatId=511

To me it just seems like he needs this drive for storage so really 7200 RPM isnt a factor then and even most hard core games sacrafice the little bit of extra storage for larger HD sizes,

sometimes i see that tigerdirect has cheaperr prices but only on certain products, what ever you make sure it has good reviews

no

most dells are still shipping 7200 RPM, 7200 RPM is Not SLOW, 5400 RPM IS SLOW!!!. 10,000 RPM is not the way to go, 10,000 RPM is not even mainstream yet. You get horrible MB per $1 since you can pay the same amount of money for a 10k 74GB raptor as a 160GB 7.2K Barracuda

Message Edited by HTT Good HT Bad on 07-10-2005 07:20 PM

It's a moot point. The 4100 isn't that fast a system anyway, so a 7200 rpm drive won't drag performance as it will on a 3.0GHz+ Athlon64 or Pentium4 system.

Thank 4 you suggestions I will dive into this on my own from here...glad to see people willing to help me out here... Just another Day as a Dale Jr. Fan was not a bad day at all Thanks Everyone its just me Marty B. from Fargo N.D. bye now....

GoodBye from the forums