Can Marc / anyone help please?

My 80gb deskstar Hard drive is getting full quickly! Want to purchase second HD but am a little confused. Can anyone enlightedn me:

1. What is difference between SATA and UDMA?
2. Any notable difference between UDMA 100 and 133?
3. Recommended cache size (minimum/optimum)?
4. Note some of you guys talk about seperate os/boot drive. How does this work? what are benefits/downsides/ how do I set it up?
5. Any recommended buys? Have looked at Hitachi Deskstar 7K250, buffer 8mb, UDMA 100, 160 GB at £72 inc. from Dabs. Any comments?

Thanks in anticipation,

Nigel

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AMD athlon 2000, Deskstar 80gb, Spinpoint 160gb, 1gb mem, Radion 9000, Pioneer A107 8x +/- drd rw, XP, Premier Pro

Handycam: Sony DCR-TRV14E. Firewire

UDMA (Ultra Direct Memory Access) describes the way in which the drive interfaces with the rest of your PC. The numbers at the end refer to the theoretical limit on the amount of data (in Megabytes) that can be transferred every second. In order to take advantage of the higher data rates, your motherboard must be able to support the higher standard. If you put a UDMA133 drive in a motherboard that supports upto 66, your throughput will be limited to the theoretical limit of 66.

SATA uses a different interface and the current standard is 150Mbps. You'll notice that this is higher than than the fastest UDMA standard. However, in practice, fast IDE (UDMA) drives perform on a par with SATA drives. Recent SATA drives are however starting to shine, and providing your motherboard supports it (unlikely on an old machine), I'd upgrade to that. I just like the smaller connectors

Go with an 8MB cache.

A seperate boot drive keeps your OS data seperate from your video. This serves a few purposes:

1) disk maintainance - it's easier to keep your video drive defraged and running smothly
2) reduces seek time if OS dependant apps are running in the background

Essentially it helps ensure no droped frames.

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video editing guides | video upload | wedding guides | website hosting

Many thanks Marc,

Not sure if my hard drive (A7V8X) supports SATA so I will stick with UDMA.

I think I will go with Deskstar as it has an 8mb cache. Will seperate my hard drives as it sounds like the sensible thing to do.

Yours,

Slowly being converted to becoming a late night producer!

Nigel

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AMD athlon 2000, Deskstar 80gb, Spinpoint 160gb, 1gb mem, Radion 9000, Pioneer A107 8x +/- drd rw, XP, Premier Pro

Handycam: Sony DCR-TRV14E. Firewire

Your original post asked all the questions I had, I've been looking for a second Hard drive, and the Deskstar 160GB one on Dabs.com caught my eye too.
I was wondering if you had invested in it and if so was it performing well?
Thanks.