A Hard Drive Question?

Sting · Post by **Sting** » Mon May 26, 2008 7:26 pm

Hi.

I have a Western Digital WDC WD400EB 00CPFO Hard Drive installed on my system. I know my motherboard supports both IDE and SATA Hard Drives. Is there anywhere I can check to see without taken the cover off my tower, what type my Hard Drive is and its speed? I did a quick check under Google and found tons of Hard Drives, but nothing that really helped me. I also checked under Device Manager, but didn't find much help there either. The reason why is I’ve heard that SATA HD’s are faster then IDE. Is that true?

Thanks for your time.

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Mon May 26, 2008 8:14 pm

Looks to be a 5400rpm IDE drive. A more modern SATA drive will be quicker.

Sting · Post by **Sting** » Mon May 26, 2008 8:38 pm

brembo wrote:Looks to be a 5400rpm IDE drive. A more modern SATA drive will be quicker.

Thanks, “Brembo” for the help. I was thinking on the same line that it was an IDE Hard Drive instead of SATA. But to be sure I’ll remove the cover and see if there is any literature on the HD case. I have a question: can an IDE HD be placed on a SATA Channel? I know your SATA cable is different then your IDE cable. But the reason I ask is when I went into my BIOS to check it out, it reads:

IDE Channel 0 Master: Pioneer DVD
IDE Channel 0 Slave: None
SATA Channel 1: None
SATA Channel 2: WDC WD400EB – 00CPFO

brembo · Post by **brembo** » Mon May 26, 2008 8:46 pm

They make adapters that attach to the back of the HDD. Fiddly little things too, work okay I suppoe.

Post by **YeOldeStonecat** » Tue May 27, 2008 6:22 am

No need to pull the cover to find info on the drive..just Google the model number...WD400EB.
Or...search Western Digitals support site...which yields this info...
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... _topview=1

It's a Western Digital "Protege" drive, 40 gigs, 5,400rpm, 2 megs cache, less than 500,000 hours MTBF. The Protege line is Western Digitals budget line.

So yours appears to already be mounted on an IDE==>Sata conversion.

If you upgrade/replace this drive with a new SATA drive, your computer would most likely gain a bit of performance. For a while now..hard drives have been running 7,200rpm, and have at least 8 megs of cache.

Sting · Post by **Sting** » Thu Jun 05, 2008 12:40 am

YeOldeStonecat wrote:No need to pull the cover to find info on the drive..just Google the model number...WD400EB.
Or...search Western Digitals support site...which yields this info...
http://wdc.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/wdc.cfg ... _topview=1

It's a Western Digital "Protege" drive, 40 gigs, 5,400rpm, 2 megs cache, less than 500,000 hours MTBF. The Protege line is Western Digitals budget line.

So yours appears to already be mounted on an IDE==>Sata conversion.

If you upgrade/replace this drive with a new SATA drive, your computer would most likely gain a bit of performance. For a while now..hard drives have been running 7,200rpm, and have at least 8 megs of cache.

Thanks, friend for the info.