Udedenkz wrote:
Huh... so are you saying that having a slower hard drive with a faster one = having two slow ones?
Not quite. It's more interface speed. So an ATA-100 drive with an ATA-66 drive would be forced to operate at ATA-66. This is so that the parallel operations remain synchronized properly. But two ATA-100 drives, where one is 7200 RPM and the other is 5400 RPM would not affect each other's performance...Sort of. The second drive
would slow the first one down, but only under certain circumstances, not all the time (the controller would lock during access to the slower drive, so the faster one has to wait for it in order to do its data access; though that can be worked around using an asynchronous interrupt-based architecture instead of a synchronous architecture, though it ends up being much more difficult and expensive to implement. I'm not sure what sort of an architectural scheme hard disk controllers use, I didn't ever have to actually interface with a hard disk so I never looked up a datasheet for an IDE controller). Computers are very complicated devices. ;)
Udedenkz wrote:
80 wire connectors look the same as 40, don't they?
Yes, they're both forty pin connectors. ATA-100 cables have the extra wires to help reduce errors due to the frequency they operate at. In fact, you can use the two types interchangeably, but your 80 wire connector (which, as you noted, tends to have a blue connector on the controller end and looks finer grain) will produce more reliable data (you'd probably only notice that it's faster -- ideally any data errors are caught before they'd be apparent to the user).
Udedenkz wrote:
Weird, I always thouhght there was only one type of PCI, and a bunch of types of PCIe... But then again, from the link you gave me it seems that there is a 2 key/ divider thingy version?
Yes and no. There aren't actually two different kinds of PCI for the consumer. When you look at the slot, it's got a bit of plastic dividing the slot into a longer part and a shorter part. Some cards don't use the shorter part, or don't have connections on it, only using it for stability's sake. Unlike PCIe, there are no physical difference in the slots on the motherboard. If I'm wrong here, it's something I've never come across.
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