PC hard drive confusion

[GregaryB]

Not that long ago it used to be simple and you only had to worry about IDE and SCSI hard drives.

Now there are ATA, PATA, SATA and I am hopelessly confused.

I accidently purchased a SATA hard drive of ebay not realising the interface was different. Only paid $30 or so but still.

Now I am looking specifically for what I know as a standard IDE hard drive, but some are labelled IDE/PATA/ATA.

Some adds for 250GB plus hard drives say that they are best suited to video recording devices.

I have a pentium IV.

What friggin hard drive in the range 200-400GB is going to be compatible with my PC??????

[RDee]

GregaryB,

IDE, ATA and PATA drives are essentially the same thing:
http://www.harddrivereport.com/pata_vs_ ... s_ide.html

Any reasonably recent version of the above will suit your Pentium IV.

You could buy an appropriate case for your SATA drive and make it into an external USB 2.0 drive.

RDee

[aussieboykie]

You could buy an appropriate case for your SATA drive and make it into an external USB 2.0 drive.

You could also buy a SATA adapter card for your Pentium 4 and mount your SATA drive internally.

Regards, AB