Mixing Hard Drive Brands

[Rokkaholik]

I'm currently assembling a custom PC similar to mine for a friend, and he doesn't have the funds to go all out with some of the hardware.

 

The question we have is this:

 

The main drive in his PC is a 320GB Western Digital SATA. He'd like a drive for storage. I have a 500GB Seagate SATA drive that I could install for him, but I generally don't like to mix hard drive brands in the same PC.

 

Has anyone here experienced any problems mixing 2 different brand SATA hard drives in the same PC?

 

Years ago, I had a Seagate (main) and a Western Digital (slave) IDE drives in my old Dell 4600 and for some reason, the read/write speeds between the 2 were slow as hell. I finally switched out the WD for a Seagate in that PC, and both the Seagates reading and writing sped up considerably.

 

 

Thanks in advance for any advice

[hardnrg]

if you slave/master any two devices on the same ATA cable, the transfer speeds between the two will be greatly diminished... this isn't a brand problem... it's a limitation of parallel ATA...

[soundx98]

^^^^

What hardnrg said.

Never had a problem mixing HDD brands on the same rig.

Even had 2 different brands running in RAID 0 for a while.

You and your bud should be good to go.

[Waco]

if you slave/master any two devices on the same ATA cable, the transfer speeds between the two will be greatly diminished... this isn't a brand problem... it's a limitation of parallel ATA...

What he said.

 

PATA can only talk to one device in the signal chain at a time so writing from drive to drive will always be dead slow unless you put them on separate channels.

[ClayMeow]

The only time it's an issue is with RAID (and even then, it can be done). I have WD and Seagate in my current machine, and I think I have WD and Maxtor in my dad's. Mixing brands is fine.

[Great_Gig]

Pretty much always had a mix of drives and never had any sort of problem. RAID is the only thing to be wary off as mentioned, but as long as you match them as closely as possible it is often OK to RAID differing manufacturers. I don't recommend it, but I do know it works.

 

GG

[Rokkaholik]

Thanks for the replies. There'll be no raid setup here, just a primary drive and the backup storage drive. I'm not a fan of Raid anyway.

[hardnrg]

if there's no RAID and there's no mixed PATA, you can use whatever hard drives you want

[Rokkaholik]

if there's no RAID and there's no mixed PATA, you can use whatever hard drives you want

 

Yeah.. I was hoping that the SATA drives had made some improvements over the older IDE ones. The weird thing was on my old Dell 4600 on the IDE's I had, the mixed WD and Seagate didn't like each other too much, but when I switched the WD out for the another Seagate and had them both on the same ribbon, the transfer times between the drives sped up considerably. The WD drive was a great drive and worked well when I installed it on another machine with another WD though. That's why I wanted to make sure. Thanks again