Hard Drives
I have been stripping all of the hardware out of this old PC and I finally found something I can keep and re-use! In the five year old PC were SATA hard drives. These older SATA drives have both a SATA connector, SATA power connector and an old type four-pin power connector.
The new hard drive, a 500GB Hitachi drive, which I am going to install when it’s time to build the new PC, doesn’t have the old four-pin connector. If you have an old power supply that has no SATA power connectors on it, you would need to use a converter.
If your PC is five years or older, there is a good chance that the hard drives you pull out of it will not be SATA at all, they could very well be PATA drives.
In the photo above you can see an old PATA drive sitting on top of the new SATA drive. See how large the main connector on the left of the PATA drive is?! The second set of pins is where you used to have to set the drive allocation as Master/Slave, something that’s not required now with SATA drives. And on the far right is the four-pin power connector. Now, turning your attention to the SATA drive underneath, you can see how streamlined the new connectors are.
When you’re choosing a hard drive to upgrade to, one of the most important things to look at is the revolutions per minute (rpm). You can get 4500rpm hard drives which you usually find in laptops, right through to 10000rpm. The most common for desktop PC hard drives and the minimum we would recommend, is 7200rpm.
rpm is not the only performance thing you need to be looking at, you also need to consider the amount of cache on the hard drive as well. The more cache you have on your hard drive the quicker smaller applications are going to be accessed. Things like Microsoft Word (and other commonly used applications) which you use frequently use will be kept in the hard drive cache, allowing for extremely fast data access.
DVD-ROM
PATA technology was still used for optical drives (except Blu-ray) until very recently. The reason for this is that DVD-ROMs had not surpassed the data requirements that PATA could provide. The new appearance of SATA connectors on optical drives are for convenience. Blu-ray optical drives do use a SATA connection, not PATA.
Optical drives only need to be updated if you require extra features or want faster burning speeds than your old drive. If your old PC had a CD-ROM, for example, but you want to be able to play DVDs on your upgraded PC, you’ll need to get yourself a DVD-ROM. If it had a DVD-ROM but you want to be able to burn DVDs, you need to get yourself a DVD-R or DVD-RW. If you’re confused about all the different types of optical drives then read over our guide to all the acronyms and numbers.
The next article in this series will discuss the choice of motherboard and CPU.