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David Bell wrote: > I'm in the process of ordering components for an Athlon 64 Linux, single disk > desktop box and am undecided (baffled) as to which type of hdd to use. Any > pro's or con's/advice from users would be appreciated. > > TIA > > Well I'd suggest going for SATA. It has a faster transfer rate, the cables are much thinner (about 1cm wide rather than about 5cm wide for PATA cables) which makes things easier. Unfortunately there don't seem to be very many SATA optical drives just yet but I'm sure things will increase in the next year. I dare say if you're running a recent distro then you shouldn't have any problems with SATA. The only con I can think of is with regards to the motherboards, you need one SATA connection for each device although even now motherboards are starting to have 4 or more SATA connections on them (I recently read about a board that had 8 SATA connectors). This shouldn't be much of an issue for a single drive system but it is always nice to have some sort of upgrade ability in the future. On the other hand I found that the new Dell systems (we use Dell at work) don't have any standard PATA ports on them which makes working with older hard drives a real pain unless you have a SATA to PATA adaptor. With regards to the Athlon too, I'd go for one of the new AM2 boards if you can, they're bound to offer more future proofing than the Socket 754 motherboard I have in my Athlon 64. :-) Rob -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html