New Harddrive Compatibility?

I am looking to buy a new hard drive, most likely 250 gb. I currently have a serial ata Hitachi 160gb harddrive w/ 8mb...what i am wondering is: what is the difference between sata and ata, will an ata harddrive work on my comp if i already have a sata drive working, and any other things i have to look out for in terms of compatibility issues. thx

 

I'm assuming you're referring to SATA and PATA. The only difference is that one is serial advanced technology attachment and the other is a parallel advanced technology attachment. Your computer actually can't tell the difference as far as reading and writing data is concerned. I have both in my computer, you really only have to worry about configuring the BIOS correctly. There's some setting called extended SATA or something like that I forget right now, that allows you to use both.

 

i was considering this...what exactly is oem..
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1265028&CatId=525

 

OEM=original equipment manufacturer. It won't come in a box and there's a difference in the warantee, like just briefly reading what it said at tigerdirect, seagate provides the warantee not TG. I've bought drives like that, I think some of them are reconditioned by the factory or something, I don't know the details.

 

my question is whether that drive would work on my system and is there anyway to get around that 232 gb crap?

 

i am seriously considering this deal, will this work?
http://www.officemax.com/max/soluti...UseBVCookie=no&affCode=PRF&siteID=k26451&mid=
please respond asap

 

Also, since its 320 gigabytes, i heard that wondows has a 232 gb limit...is there any way to get around that..in other words, how can i make windows see all 320 gb of my hd

 

alrite..if this is not fake...then holy S***!
http://www.spacecentersystems.com/catalog/product_info.php/products_id/215529

 

Yea, I'm wondering. Might be a typo--> "Disclaimer: Some prices on our site maybe inaccurate due to an error. These orders will be canceled"

"i heard that wondows has a 232 gb limit"

There used to be a 127MB limit. So long as you have a 48-bit LBA compatible motherboard(which I'm sure you do) and XP SP1 or greater you can use a drive that has more than 127MBs

What confuses alot of people is that they don't use the actual binary size in their adds and on the box, you only see the binary size within windows. To get the binary size you have to multiply the sector size(usually 512kb) X cylinders X heads X number of sectors then divide by 1024 three times and you get the actual amount of gigabytes on your drive. You can find out those numbers by using maxtors powermax utility or most other HD utilities. To make matters more confusing some drives are shipped with HPAs and DCOs which make the drives appear even smaller. If you want to know more read THIS

 

512 BYTES not KILObytes ... oops!