Second hard drive: Part 2

[Keith Mastin]

Hi Phillip,

> I'm still trying to get enough information to feel comfortable about
> sticking a second hard drive in my PC with some hope of it working.
>
> The machine is a Dell XPS B733: Pentium 3, about 3 or 4 years old.  I
> went shopping yesterday and the first person I talked to who sounded
> knowledgeable said that a current 40GB drive would *probably* work, but
> larger ones might not be recognized by the IDE controller.  My user
> manual says the Dell uses ATA-33 (which I assume matches the 33Mhz PCI
> bus speed), while current drives all refer to ATA-133.  The
> salesperson's not-very-reassuring comment was that the 133 drives
> should be backward compatible to 100...and then I started wondering
> whether he was talking about RAM speeds instead.

Yeah, he was confusing terms like crazy. ATA-33 is 33 MB/s (Ultra ATA mode
2), and ATA133 is supposed to be capable of 133 MB/s (Ultra ATA mode ).
ATA-133 is a bit of a farce. "-33," "-66," and "-100" really only tell you
that the drive can burst up to that particular speed. They usually have a
hard time sustaining a respectable and steady 45 MB/s.

A quick search through the dell site shows that this system can handle a
250GB hard drive.
http://support.dell.com/us/en/docs/index.asp?cc=7&ct=28

Always, always always search the 'net before talking to retail
salespeople. If they have half a clue they're dangerous.

<anecdote>
There's an A+ dude works in the Future Shop around the corner, and the one
time I talked to him he insisted that BSD couldn't handle new hardware,
and that's why they (FS) only sell systems with windoh$ on them. :| (I
gave him points for trying though)
</anecdote>

HTH

-- 
Keith Mastin
BeechTree Information Technology Services Inc.
Toronto, Canada
(416)696 6070


--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml