I need a new disk since my 40gb i filling up and Georender is coming out with 600mbs of photoreal texture for Alaska. Therefore, the question is should I stick with IDE or go to SATA. The motherboard works with either. Any comments or recommendations. Looking at an 80 gb size 7200rpm 8mb cache.One other note. From wrongly selecting SATA when I first setup my motherboard it appeared that IDE and SATA cannot co-exist?? If so, I will have to dump my "stuff" to another computer and reload XP if I have to switch to all SATA.Thanks,Dick Boley @KLBE

Hi Dick,SATA and IDE can indeed peacefully coexist. You might do some research on your motherboard (specilically the BIOS) to rectify your problem.SATA drives have a theoretical thruput of 150MB/sec. The best IDE drives can achieve 133MB/sec. Keep in mind these are the best the drives can do (in a perfect world). Reality is not so close.I like my Western Digital Raptors. Not cheap but very fast and well built. Been very happy with them.If you do decide to add a SATA drive the OS (and FS) should be placed on it to take advantage of any performance increase it might offer.Good luck,Greg

Hi Dick,Currently, there is very little performance improvement (if any) to using SATA but as hard drives improve in speed, the benefits of using SATA will begin to show. The cost differential between the two should be almost negligible at this point so if you can, try to use the interface of the future i.e. SATA. If anything, SATA offers you a much smaller cable to help reduce clutter within your computer case.IDE and SATA should be able to co-exist. You'll need to give more details to diagnose the problem. What exact setting did you choose in the motherboard BIOS?Edwin

The ECS KT600-A mother board has only one SATA selection in BIOS - SATA Enabled/Disabled. Not knowing what it was I tried it with my IDE drives and they were not accessable after that. Had to power off and disable SATA but then the IDE still were not available. Had to manually go through the first BIOS page disk acquisition/setup to "regenerate" each IDE drive (3). So it seems, in my case, that SATA is an all or nothing proposition.Regards,Dick Boley @KLBE