Seagate 320GB Hard Drive for $59.99 Shipped

Thanks Spoofee......it's funny how today with this price of
$0.20 per GB for a SATA drive nobody really cares and just
a few months ago it would have sold out in minutes.
 
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heh true, or perhaps that these were on sale for less at Best Buy about a month ago and a month before that and people got their fill?
 
500GB is the norm nowadays, and you waste space by putting a smaller drive, it's better to get a bigger drive. I am waiting for the 750GB's to drop in price :)
 
No. IDE refers to how the disk drive connects to the motherboard in a parallel manner. IDE uses wide cables. SATA is another type of connection that uses a skinny (usually red) cable. SATA drives are connected serially instead of parallel.

DMA refers to direct memory access, which either IDE or SATA drives can have.


Both drives above are SATA drives; the more expensive one has 16MB DMA technology while the other less expensive has 16MB UDMA technology. The UDMA (Ultra DMA) technology doubles the transfer rate of data to the motherboard over DMA.

You are better off paying less money for a faster transfer rate! Get this one.
 
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"is DMA the same as IDE?"

Technically no. But the "ultra dma" has an IDE interface, so that is the one you want if you have a parallel ATA (older style - 40 pin ribbon cable) interface.

"Both drives above are SATA drives; the more expensive one has 16MB DMA technology while the other less expensive has 16MB UDMA technology. The UDMA (Ultra DMA) technology doubles the transfer rate of data to the motherboard over DMA."

Incorrect. Only the more expensive drive is SATA, the other is PATA. the '16 MB' refers to the onboard cache buffer on the drives. They are both the same size and speed for each drive. The memory size has nothing to do with the transfer interface (PATA Udma, SATA, etc). Both drives will perform almost identically as neither can transfer at rates of 100MB/s (the slower of the 2 interface speeds).
 
spazntwitch said:
Both drives above are SATA drives; the more expensive one has 16MB DMA technology while the other less expensive has 16MB UDMA technology.
Click to expand...

You are incorrect. The cheaper drive is IDE, not serial.
 
Seagate 320Gb PATA/100 Internal 3.5" HARD DRIVE - 64.99+s/h @ Frys.com

Keyword: PATA = Parallel ATA is the primary internal storage interconnect for the desktop, connecting the host system to peripherals such as hard drives,
 
SATA and IDE are completely different technologies, even the process in which they transfer data is different. DMA is known as the term Direct Memory Access, which is used by various devices like hard drives, floppy drives, and other peripherals. When referred to the marketing of hard drives, Ultra DMA and DMA are the same thing. You will not find hard drives made for just DMA, these days just Ultra DMA, so people just commonly call it the same.

Serial ATA functions completely different, instead of data being sent in parallel, naturally as its name means, it is sent in a serial method.

I don't think they made a regular DMA hard drive in what 15 years maybe?
 
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