SATA!?

[Mr. Analog]

 I want to build my new box this week and I don't want to tear down my current beastie just yet so I thought that this might be a good time to go Serial ATA. What I'm wondering is; are there any brands I should avoid and is there a big difference between the 8 and 16 MB cache?

[Shayne]

 I buy Seagate exculsively now.  With NCQ available on SATA, and nForce4 boards (or PCI cards) supporting this, the performance is nice.

As for 8Mb - 16MB, i would assume an increase, though the cache is their for the larger drives i suppose to lower times?  *shrug*

[Lazybones]

 Ya I think that Seagate is the only one that supports SATA NCQ. NCQ does not improve load times or sequential read speed but it does improve performance when accessing random sections of a hard drive.

I have heard that the 16MB cache drives are significantly faster than the 8MB ones.

[Fedora Gal]

 my new drive is a 300 Gig 16mb drive and whoooweee does it fly, a direct quote from Mel is it's F***ing fast!

[Cova]

 Maxtor DiamondMax 10 series drives also support NCQ, eg. Shaeleam's new one.  I was looking around at drives/prices just before Frag, and currently I'd recommend that Maxtor 300gb 16MB cache one to anyone looking to buy.  They were listed for $220 at Memory Express before Frag started, may have changed by now.