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What Types Of Connections Are There


c0ld

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This is a big time newb question, but I'm a big time newb here in the hard drive department. I know (or think I do) that the thick cable used for plugging things in is an IDE cable.. What's that stand for? What's the difference between SATA and PATA and what does ATA stand for? How does RAID setpus work and how many types are there? TIA for putting up with my utter nubness. <_<

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Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) (taken from http://www.smartcomputing.com )

A standard used since the mid-1980s for connecting hard drives, CD-ROM drives, and tape drives to computers. IDE and its updated successor, Enhanced IDE (EIDE), are based on the original IBM PC ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) 16-bit bus standard. Up to two IDE devices can attach to a single IDE ribbon cable. Many motherboards include built-in support for IDE devices, while others require a separate IDE adapter plugged into an expansion slot. IDE adapters, whether built-in or separate, are relatively simple and inexpensive, because IDE devices carry their own controller circuitry. IDE is also known as ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment), while EIDE is sometimes called Fast ATA. IDE differs from the SCSI (Small Computer Systems Interface) standard that is most often on Macintosh computers. SCSI is usually thought of as faster than IDE but more expensive and complicated to use.

 

ATA/PATA is the same as IDE

 

PATA has a maximum bandwidth of 133Mb/s

SATA has a maximum bandwidth of 150Mb/s

 

RAID - Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks

There are too many to expain all of them, but the three main ones are

RAID 0 (striping), RAID 1 (mirroring), and RAID 0+1 (mirrored striping)

 

Striping- writes data in stripes to two seperate HDDs, creating double the bandwidth

 

Mirroring- writes the same data on two Hard Drives, so yu always have a perfect backup of your data

 

Mirrored striping- Writes data in stripes across four hard drives, two of which are perfect copies of the other two

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Will a SATA cable plug into a regular IDE/ATA hard drive or does it need a special port?

well, i think they have converters out there, but no, a sata cable is smaller than an ide cable.

 

btw, as for your question about raid, your mobo has to have the capability, or you'd have to get a separate raid card for a pci slot. You can't setup raid on a normal ide.

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  • 1 month later...
RAID 0 and 1 use two IDE cables, but RAID 0+1 uses 4 IDE cables.

Actually you need to have only one cable for RAID 0/1 and 2 cables for RAID 1+0

With RAID 1/0 you have both drives on the same cable, set as master and slave.

and with RAID 1+0 you have that twice.

 

There is also a RAID 5, not sure what it does or how it works, but it requires 5 drives.

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There is also a RAID 5, not sure what it does or how it works, but it requires 5 drives.

no, if I recall corectly that is what some people call 0+1... ALL raid setup's require even numbers of harddrives... ... ...I think... :) anyone want to confirm that?

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There are really 6 types of RAID, and 0+1/1+0 which are slightly different.

And you have to use seperate IDE cables because if you don't, you're wasting the entire point of RAID! There is no difference between rounded/ribbon cables but looks. There are two different types of cables thou, UDMA and IDE. UDMA has ground per each pin, and IDE does not. They are interchangable, but IDE only allows for 33MB/s while UDMA can do 133 MB/s (or the fastest your drives can do.

Here are the different RAID setups.

# - NAME (min. disks, short descrip.) [why its good]

 

0 - Stripping (2 disks, each getting half data) [Fast read and write, not secure]

1 - Mirroring (2 disks, each getting all data) [Fast read, and secure (redundant)]

2 - Not much info on it, but it serves no practical use. The best I remember is that it was used widely before error correction. It does use parity.

3 - Byte Level Stripping, with parity drive. (3 disks, two getting half data and one getting parity drive.) [Fast read, fast write, secure - not cheap)

4 - Same as 3, but stripped on a byte level.

5 - Same as 4, but with disturbed parity. (3 disks, three spilting evenly with parity) [fast read, slow write, very secure, not cheap]

 

There of course is also 0+1 and 1+0. In each of those, the first number happens first, and you guys can figure that out on your own.

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