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First post, by Private_Ops

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Need a good IDE hard drive for an Athlon XP 3000+ on an Nforce 2 chipset.

Anyone have an recommendations of something north of 100GB?

Reply 1 of 10, by firage

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A wealth of options there. Whatever you can find the best deal on. Seagate, Samsung and Western Digital were always reliable performers in that late PATA era.

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Reply 2 of 10, by Chewhacca

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WD 1200JB

Reply 3 of 10, by Harekiet

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Or pick up one of them pata to sata converters off of ebay and use some sata drive you have lying around.

Reply 4 of 10, by PhilsComputerLab

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Yea that's what I do. At work we recycled a ton of machines with 80 and 160 GB drives, but they were all SATA. Funny, the optical drives were still PATA 😀

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Reply 5 of 10, by RobW0lf

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Get a later, either new or used WD IDE drive. Basically the Caviar Blue IDE drives, all of them are extremely reliable and definitely worth the money.

Reply 6 of 10, by chinny22

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What scared me off large IDE drives was the terrible value for money, so also went down the IDE to SATA adaptors

Reply 7 of 10, by candle_86

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Yea go SATA to PATA, though Nforce2 some boards had SATA ports and if they do they have 9x drivers for the sata you can intergrate into your 9x image. Thats how my 500gb is hooked up in my AXP, its just a D drive, boot drive is an 80gb IDE

Reply 8 of 10, by shamino

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As mentioned, some nForce2 boards have an early SATA controller. I do remember some talk about the Sil3112 being buggy on the ABit NF7-S and AN7, but I never tried those ports myself. Maybe it was just immature drivers or firmware. A PCI SATA card is another option.

SATA was never integrated with these chipsets though, so it will always be connected via a PCI device (just like using a card). Therefore using SATA ports on an nForce2 will heavily load the PCI bandwidth. Using adapters through the IDE ports will bypass the PCI bus, but you might not care either way.

Hard drives is something where everybody will have different experiences and opinions. I've had more experience with the Seagate 7200.7 IDE drives than any others in this size range. I liked them, the 3 failures I saw were IMO justified and the other 4 still work. But they are an older 80GB per platter design so they probably don't make as much sense as getting a later model WD drive. The later Seagate 7200.10 and 7200.11 drives started to get into controversial problems so I'd avoid those.

Reply 9 of 10, by Private_Ops

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I have an FIC AU13, my particular board is not SATA equipped.

I was previously using a Seagate 120GB drive but, it only had 2MB of cache. What research I have done, it seems the late Western Digital Blues are probably my best bet.

Thanks for the opinions/info guys.

Reply 10 of 10, by Kodai

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Another vote for SATA to PATA adaptors. They a cheap, simple, and don't require any special software or setup. They also allow "enable DMA" in Win 9x properties without the trouble that SATA based PCI cards often cause. It's a pure win-win with adaptors with HDD's, but you will still want a PATA optical drive with hookup to sound card for those games that used redbook audio on CD.