Specific Recommendations

If you are going to add a hard disk to a system today, I can give you a few recommendations. For the drive interface, there really are only two types to consider:

• ATA (AT Attachment, also called IDE)
• SCSI (Small Computer System Interface)
• Serial ATA(SATA1-1.5Gbps-2000/SATA2-3.0Gbps-2004/SATA3-6.0Gbps-2009)

Note that the current fastest ATA standard is UltraDMA/100 or UltraATA/100, which runs at 100MB/sec raw interface transfer rate. Serial ATA is coming out with a 150MB/sec transfer rate. The current fastest SCSI standard is Ultra4 (also called Ultra/320)-SCSI, which runs a raw interface transfer rate of 320MB/sec. Both interfaces have improvements slated that should double their respective transfer rates in the future.