Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA Hard Disk
Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 200GB SATA Hard Drive
Date: September 2003
Site: Maxtor
Price: £150 at time of writing
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Hard drive capacities have grown considerably over the last few years, and with ever increasing program and game disk space demands more and more people are looking for larger and faster drives.
An example of this space demand could be that a average Windows XP install with a few applications can easily take up around 1.5Gb with Office and other programs you could easily be using 3-4Gb. Computer games are also becoming more complex and space hungry, Medal of Honour allied assault recommends around 1.5Gb of space just to install it.
Traditional hard drive technology ATA (Parallel ATA) has been around since the early days and has evolved from 66 & 100 modes to the current 133 ATA format. These speeds relate to the External Transfer Rate (MB/sec) so the 133 format has a theoretical rate of 133/MB/sec.
Newer technology which offers faster transfer speeds is now emerging and is being included on several motherboards is Serial ATA (SATA) If you don't have a enabled board you can buy a PCI adapter card to connect the drives, most adapter cards also allow you to connect your existing ATA drives to the SATA interface via a converter.
