Buying a new PC

[schi0249]

I am braking down and buying a PC instead of building one. With school and work, I don't have the spare time to mess around with a computer. My question is this... these days many system boards are only supporting SATA. I have a 300 GB PATA hard drive and a dual layer DVD burner I wanna use. If I buy a PATA PCI card, would I be able to use it? I know they make PATA to SATA convertor boards, but I have heard mixed things about them. Any advice? Thanks.

 

[lordofduct]

only supporting sata?

Know, Sata optical drives are not very common so PATA tends to be available 99% of the time. The boot drive may be sata, but that doesn't mean you can't stick that 300 GB IDE drive in there as storage... and of course hop into the BIOS if you want to use it as a bootable drive.

If you want to 'make sure' for your own sake then while your at the store if thats where you are getting it. Restart the machine and hop into the BIOS and take a look if it has PATA. Don't let them catch you doing it though, they tend not to like that.

 

[schi0249]

I am looking at getting a Dell, and the detailed info shows only SATA ports. Also, the instructions mention it as well.

 

[lordofduct]

which Dell is that?

I just looked at a few of their machines and the all seemed to have IDE ports for optical drives... which of course will support hard drives as well.

Also, you can of course use a PCI expansion card too. They aren't as fast (restricted by the PCI port), but then you could get a PCI-e 1X card which is a dedicated channel to get good speed out of the drive. Keep in mind regular PCI slots share their bandwidth across the entire PCI bus.

 

[schi0249]

I was looking at the Dell Dimension E521. I'm on an uber tight budget (less than $500). Does anyone have experience using thsoe PATA to SATA convertors? I have heard they are fine for HDD, but have compatibility issues when connecting to a CD/DVD drive.

 

[lordofduct]

it does show that the e521 doesn't have PATA

here's a review of a pata-sata converter

http://www.amug.org/amug-web/html/amug/reviews/articles/ide-sata/

I've never really dealt with them, personally I wouldn't trust them and would go with the add on cards like this one.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16816102007

I actually have that card... don't use it anymore as I don't have any need for it. Although mine is only ATA100 standard (basically the same thing, just slower speed... same brand). It works just fine... I can sell you mine for a few bucks plus shipping if you want.

 

[joe81]

why not check out http://ibuypower.com

 

[schi0249]

Have you bought from them in the past? They do have some nice prices, and I do have an OS disc already. The downside to buying a PC from the majors, is they seem to all have switched over to Vista. And I am not super interested in running that OS a launch. XP was bad enough at launch.

 

[joe81]

i haven't ordered from them but a close friend did and he never had any problems he actually recomended the site to me. i plan on buying a maxed out system sometime in the near future off them when some of the new graphics card lines start hitting the stores.

 

[VertigoXX]

If you don't want to build it yourself, but don't mind spending some time customizing it, these guys have some very nice systems at a very cheap price. They still have systems with XP as well as some new ones with Vista. (Hell, they still sell new systems with Windows ME on them.)

They offer some custom options as well, if you need something upgraded here or there from the basic package.

http://3btech.net/systems2.html