Building your own PC - Part 4

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Jan 29, 1999

This week's article looks at fitting hard disks, tape drives and CD-ROM's to your PC along with some considerations that need to be made.

Disk Controllers

In order for a hard disk to work, it is necessary to have a disk controller. The job of the controller is to handle the data transfer between the computer and the disk drive. In olden days, the disk controller was a separate card that connected to the motherboard and had cables leading to the hard drives (the controller usually acted as a floppy controller too).

Nowadays, most motherboards are fitted with an on-board controller, which frees up a slot but they are always for IDE devices. IDE is the "industry standard" that allows different disk manufacturers to make drives that they know will work on any make of PC.

There is, however, an alternative and that is SCSI. SCSI devices also need a controller but they have some distinct advantages over their IDE counterparts. To help you, here's a list of the pro's and con's of IDE and SCSI.

IDE

Pro's

· The controller is usually built in to the motherboard making the purchase of a separate controller unnecessary.

· No controller in an expansion slot means the slot is available for another device.

· IDE drives are usually cheaper than their SCSI counterparts (although the divide is a lot less these days than before).

· Up to 4 physical drives can be fitted (assuming you have the room inside your PC).

· Most pre-built PC's come fitted with IDE drives.

Con's

· Limitation on the number of drives that can be run - 4 only

· When more than 1 drive is used, the settings can be tricky as you have slaves and master disks to contend with)

· Data transfer rates are generally slower than SCSI devices (although, again, the divide is narrower now than before).

· It is not an easy job to update the on-board controller if a faster/better controller is released onto the market.