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IDE

Storage Triage--How to Upgrade and Reuse Your Old Hard Drive

Posted 01/27/2010 at 8:00pm | by Mark Edward Soper

6

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It's a new year, a new decade, with bigger hard disks than ever and new technologies like SATA 6Gbps, USB 3.0, and bigger solid-state drives to choose from. So, what do you do with the drives you've replaced (or will replace this year)? From drive enclosures and media streamers to storage for home servers and salvage fodder, find out the best ways to decide which drives get promoted, which drives are out, and which drives deserve a second life.

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SATA vs. IDE

Posted 09/15/2009 at 1:25pm | by The Maximum PC Staff

5

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Ask the Doctor Logo I am planning on building a new video-editing system and have never configured SATA devices before.

Does the SATA architecture work in a similar fashion as IDE (i.e., master and slave devices per channel) or are the ports single-homed? I was planning on building a system with RAID 1 OS drives, a separate swap file drive, and RAID 1 data drives. That would use up five ports if they are single-homed. Which brings me to my second question: Is there a benefit to having SATA optical drives or should I put them on the IDE channels?

—Matthew Miller

Read on to see the answer to Matthew's question.

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