Is this a good deal?

I use a program called HWiNFO32. Lots of information from it. And it's freeware now.

Motherboard Model: ECS RS480-A/M/RS482-M(754)/KA1 MVP/RD480-A939
Motherboard Chipset: ATI RADEON Xpress 200/1100/1150 (RS482/RS485) + SB400
Motherboard Slots: 4xISA, 4xPCI, 1xAGP
 
Wow. I thought it was all IDE. Since I have IDE drive and all.

Thank you.
 
An aside: most motherboards show SATA as IDE drives ( look in the BIOS, I for instance have IDE channel 0 Master and Slave and then IDE channel 1-6 for the 6 SATA channels. )
 
I did once write down a bunch the BIOS information when I accidentally had the keyboard unplugged. I think my mom threw it out though.

EDIT: Found it beside my printer. There's a few mistakes, the strikeouts, and I can't really understand some of my own writing:

Phoenix - Award Workstation BIOS v 6.00PG Energy Star Ally
488
RS8 RS482 - M
Main processor: AMD Athlon 64 Processor 3500+, 1 CPU
IDE Chah
IDE Channel 0 Master: Maxtor 6L160P0 BAJ41620
Click to expand...
 
Lists your chipset model, you have a single core Athlon 3500+ and you have a 160GB maxtor HDD (DiamondMax 10 160GB, usually SATA interface fyi, although its old enough that EIDE was still prevailent)
 
My hard drive is actually 150 gigs, although I've heard the real capacity is more because of OS limitations, or something like that.

My mom says she doesn't want to order online, because if it fails it can be a hassle to take back, even though I told her it was cheaper..

Good news is my computer will be paid off in full in a matter of a few months -- maybe three or four.
 
Thank you.

I read the amount of bytes is the true size.
 
Zelig said:
But technically, the hard drive manfufacturers are correct, and operating systems should be using "gibibytes" instead of "gigabytes".
Click to expand...

I thought they were the same thing. :confused:

On Wikipedia, it says "giga" is a decimal, while "gibi" is a binary.
 
That's just so they can standardize the nomenclature. As you've already found out, one is decimal the other is binary.
 
I think "160 gigs" means its actually 160000 megabytes, while that would actually make it 156.25 gigs. Dunno where the other 6 gigabytes went.

My mom seems to think because her computer is a year older than mine, the HDD will die before mine. I go "Nope. For one, you have a WD*, while I have a crummy old Maxtor. And second, you don't use yours half as much as I use mine."

*I checked it when she was asleep. It said "WDC" which I assume stands for Western Digital Caviar.
 
It's all in the math. If you multiply 160 by 1000^3, you get 160,000,000,000 bytes. Which is the size of your drive, minus some housecleaning stuff. Take that number and convert it into binary, and you end up getting the size in Gibibytes that the computer reports as gigabytes.
 
Depends, if she has one of the older WD's, it may just die before the maxtor. HDD manufacturer quality kinda goes around, right now being on WD and samsung ( havent heard about many problems from samsung 1TB's )
 
Genocidicbunny said:
Are you saying this from the speed standpoint or the 'new motherboards only have one IDE connector nowadays' standpoint?
Most mechanical HDD"s would have trouble saturating the 133MB/s bandwidth of a PATA hdd.
The only good reason to get a PATA drive though is if it was significantly cheaper than a SATA one or you do not have SATA.
Click to expand...

The latter comes closer. As far as i know, aimee is operating under a tight budget, so any purchases should be made with long term usability in mind.
 
I was talking to someone who works with hard drives and stuff (data recovery, mainly), and he says my computer dates from around the time that IDE was moving onto SATA, and that my mobo actually has both.
 
Yes. But computers still have IDE. Because the connections IDE hard drives use are the same as the connector for optical drives. What has changed is that a motherboard now will most likely only have one IDE connector for the optical drives (CD and DVD), where earlier boards had 2 connectors. Each connector can handle 2 drives. So previously you could have any combination of 4 IDE devices, and now you can have any combination of 2.

It appears that your board was built while SATA drives were just becoming popular, so the maker made it able to go either way. You can use any combination of 4 IDE drives AND up to 4 SATA dives.
 
That's cool. I have two optical drives, but I can't tell if they're seperate or not.

At the store, the SATA drives were a few dollars cheaper.
 
Cutlass said:
Yes. But computers still have IDE. Because the connections IDE hard drives use are the same as the connector for optical drives. What has changed is that a motherboard now will most likely only have one IDE connector for the optical drives (CD and DVD), where earlier boards had 2 connectors. Each connector can handle 2 drives. So previously you could have any combination of 4 IDE devices, and now you can have any combination of 2.
Click to expand...

There is an easy work around to that, if you are IDE-phillic. Use the IDE connector to connect your Hard-drives(s) and then put a IDE-to-sata convertor on your IDE optical drive(s) and connect them to the mobo by sata cables.

That's how I have my comp set up.
 
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