Godzilla-Size Hard Drives

The Older PC

Worried that your PC won't be compatible with the latest hard drives? Relax. If your system was manufactured after 1993, you shouldn't encounter any problems. But even if you do, you'll probably find the answer easily in your kit's documentation or on your PC maker's Web site. Still, before tackling any hard drive upgrade, you should check the manufacturer's Web site for the most recent information. Some sites, like Seagate's and Western Digital's, offer outstanding support--better than the companies' phone support, which we found to be merely average.

There is, however, one compatibility issue to keep in mind: If you bought your PC before 1996, it may not take full advantage of your new drive's top speed. All the drives we tested except the Fujitsus use the latest high-speed interface, known variously as UltraDMA, UltraATA, or ATA-4. This interface offers a maximum transfer speed (also known as burst rate) of 33 megabits per second--twice that of ATA-3 drives like the Fujitsus. Only the newest PCs--usually those made in the past year--have ATA-4 support, which requires a motherboard with Intel's LX or TX chip set and BIOS.

To find out if your PC supports ATA-4, check the computer manual or open your BIOS setup program, where the type of hard drive support is usually shown in the peripherals section. If your PC doesn't qualify, it's not a big problem. All ATA-4 drives are backward compatible with older motherboards, but you'll be limited to a maximum transfer rate of 16.7 mbps--half the burst rate of optimal ATA-4 but still plenty for all common applications. The burst rate of a drive isn't critical for most real-world applications; you might notice a difference only if your hard drive were perfectly defragmented and you were reading long documents off it (the less fragmentation, the less the drive head has to search to read a file). If you really want that extra speed, though, you can get a PCI add-in ATA-4 card like Promise Technology's Ultra33 card for $60 to $80.

SUMMARY

Ultra33 $60 to $80 list Promise Technology 800/888-0245 www.promise.com