The meaning of life (er, storage)

Readers wrestle with the floppy question, SATA vs. PATA and a computer Catch-22

Connection Coach By James E. Gaskin, Network World
June 06, 2005 12:04 AM ET

Traci from Boston: My company just sent me a new notebook computer that lacks a CD-ROM drive, along with a big box of software applications. How the heck do I install them?

Coach: Assuming your notebook has a network connection, you can share a CD-ROM from another computer. Use Windows sharing tools by right-clicking the CD-ROM drive in the 'My Computer' window then choosing Sharing and Security. Most applications will install this way. However, this won't help you boot the notebook in case you need to recover from a hard disk problem. For that feature and future peace of mind, get an external USB-connected CD-ROM drive. Plain CD-ROM readers cost about $50, or splurge for an external CD-DVD read/write, do-everything drive for about $200.

Frank from Philadelphia: Why do computers still come with floppy disk drives?

Coach: It's like your appendix - useful once, but no longer - floppy drives seem to be an anachronism. However, if you build your own computer, the only way to load special drivers during Windows installation is via floppy. Stupid but true. Maybe Microsoft will fix this oversight in Longhorn, meaning we'll only have to keep floppies for another two or three years. (Of course, you can always load Linux instead; it doesn't need a floppy.)

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Jerry from Denver: When I took my kids to buy a new computer, the hard drive choice was between Parallel Advanced Technology Attachment or Serial Advanced Technology Attachment (my son wanted PATA, and my daughter demanded SATA). What happened to Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) and SCSI?

DISK DON'TS

Don't move a hard disk while it's running. Turn your PC off before moving it, and while notebook drives can handle some movement, don' dance like in the iPod commercial with notebook in hand.

Don't restart a hard drive until it has stopped completely. Give it at least 15 seconds between hitting the off switch and starting again.

CDs and DVDs might never decompose in a landfill, but dirt, scratches and fingerprints on the data side will ruin the disk. Keep them in sleeves or boxes and out of the sun.

Click to see:

Coach: More market stupidity. Standard IDE hard drives, the ones used in desktop PCs forever, have been renamed PATA drives, supposedly to help differentiate them from the newer SATA drives.

In choosing a drive, take your daughter's advice. SATA drives are much faster (they start at 150M byte/sec throughput, higher than IDE's top speed of 133M byte/sec), and use a lower voltage. Because the drives use only seven conductors rather than 40, manufacturers can replace the wide, flat, ribbon cable with a much thinner one. The connector takes much less space on the motherboard, and the connecting cable can be more than twice as long as the IDE/PATA cable. Plus, they all have a minimum of 8M-byte cache for better performance and cost only a few dollars more.

Also, new motherboards have at least two SATA plugs and most support RAID-1 disk mirroring with minimal configuration hassle. Two drives and two connectors and BIOS settings give you disk fault-tolerance. That said, SCSI drives retain a performance advantage over SATA drives, at least for now, and remain the drive of choice in servers and disk subsystems.