I'm going to buy a new C: Hard drive for my Win XP Pro O/S

I've been told and hear a lot of people saying DON'T use a sata drive.

I find this odd to say the least but many users say ide works best if only used for your O/S.

Any thoughts?

Since SATA drives are not automatically supported under WindowsXP installation, you must install 3rd party drives to get XP to see the drive for installation. This can be a real pain in the butt unless you know what your doing or are lucky. Some people just don't like to fool with it since they are not recording to their Windows drive anyways.

I purchased a sata drive for my mac and it works great (running pro tools )
A friend of mine has pt using win xp and hasn't had any problems

That makes sense, thanks

Sata has to have a controller just like IDE. IDE has been out for 10+ years so the drivers have been floating around for a while too, not to mention there are probably only a certian number of controller chips out there.

Sata has been out only a few years and still is only now getting onto the "maintstream" PC makers agenda. So all you have to do is load the driver when Xp asks you to. The same goes for RAID, and SCSI. They all have to have controller support.

Its not a big deal really. Soon IDE will be gone, so embrace the new standard.

Beez

who told you that

in most cases it simply doesnt matter, as far as the higher level OS and programs are conserned PATA and SATA are the same they are both IDE drives. the issue can arise with some mobos when they tie the SATA controler to RAID. as the cheeper boards dont have a real hardware RAID system you have to jump through hoops to install a software RAID system. if you arnt tied to a bs raid system then it simply doesnt matter.

OK.......... I forgot a couple of other things.

My operating drive I want as only 80gig
My Sample drive S-ATA will be 250gig
Program and audio drive same

Now....... I've been searching for the best performers, price don't matter really and there's so much info out there, like everything I guess, I can't decied on anything specific, like brand!

Some say WD (I've had bad luck with 2 drives that crapped out within 6 months)
Some say seagate which i have never tried.

Any thoughts on brand and just how fussy should I be with other specs.

Thanks again everyone.

ive had a WD go bad after a month, and ive had seagates last from a about 2 years to the stage of getting to small to use and ive had maxtor drives that have lasted a long time aswell. ive read godo and bad things about all drives.
all drives are going to fail, its impossible to know which to go for. i would stick WD seagate or maxtor. find which ever one you can get the best price on and has a good waranty. a good sata drive should be 3years, where as a PATA will usualy be a 1yr waranty.

pick one and be done with it.

I hear ya, it's just that I want this new setup to be as close to perfect as possible
I think I'll give Seagate a shot.

Thanks a lot