If your systems is about 4 years old, and that is the original Disk drive, this is also relavant.
all the latest Decent m/boards suppport SATA bus which is a much faster bus transfer than earlier standards, the chances are that, if lob your old and tired disk drive in to nice new case with new m/board etc, you will not be able to utilize this increased bus though put of that interface, instead be stuck with lower data transfer speeds.
In practice, for light use you may not see much difference though, until you start doing some heavy weight apps or database work, then you will wonder why the PC is a bit slow.
which makes buying really good other components a pointless exercise.
To get the optimum performance from a PC, wether that be plain desktop or superfast graphics workstation, or high end server, you really need to optimise all the components, and make sure that they are fully compatible, and that they are able to fully utilise their connnections with other components.
Only by doing this will you truly get a 1st rate system, one that really performs well, and will be reliable .
comes back to the same old phase mate, "only as fast as the slowest component".
Have a good think about what you will be running on the system, will it be disk intensive apps, or heavy graphics work etc.
once you have decided what role the system is to fullfill, you can you decide what to get, and how to fully optimise it.
PS, If you are running heavy weight graphics or database apps etc, you should consider running a SCSI hard disk drive,
(U160/320) setup, instead of IDE based drives.
They can handle the load so much better, with little if any reduction in performance.
They don't come cheap, but they do make a big difference.
I run 3x 147Gb U320 SCSI drives, with a decent HP U320 raid card in one of my workstation systems.
Disk drive through put and performance is awsome, and it's only a 1Ghz P3 cpu.
It leaves most decent single CPU P4's miles behind. its all about optimising.
Something to chomp on mate.
cheers robin
