I have a Pentium III machine with 20G HDD. I wish to upgrade my HDD. Should I go for a SATA or IDE disk? Will SATA work on my machine (it's 3 years old)? Does it offer better performance over IDE?

Arvinder Singh, Oakhurst, NSW

I don’t believe that old Pentium III system of yours would have a SATA controller on the motherboard, so you’d need to get an add-in SATA controller card to use one of the newer drives anyway. While SATA drives are faster, the change would not give you enough of a performance boost to warrant the expense of the controller card.

Your system will currently be using either an ATA66 or, more likely, an ATA100 interface to communicate with your hard drive. Here’s the relative transfer speeds.

• ATA66 = 66 MBps
• ATA100 = 100 MBps
• SATA = 150 MBps

But don’t be fooled by that last figure, because it’s a theoretical speed only. The SATA drive is still using the PCI bus to communicate with the rest of your system, thus limiting it to 132 MBps maximum.

Now if it was me upgrading that old PC of yours, I wouldn’t bother with purchasing a SATA controller card and SATA hard drive to gain a performance boost. I’d drop in a larger IDE hard drive, and get hold of another RAM module instead.

Apart from your old 866 MHz Pentium, the 128M of RAM is the biggest performance bottleneck you have. The amount of RAM that you have would only meet the minimum requirements specifications for recent versions of most popular applications programs, and your PCs capacity to multi-task will be severely restricted. I’d advising dropping in at least another 128M of RAM, and preferably another 256M. Have a look on eBay and you’ll most likely find a RAM module to suit your system quite cheaply. To quickly identify what type of RAM module you need, simply open up your PCs case and carefully remove a RAM module from your system, then compare the slot connector to the pictorial comparison you’ll find at Hal’s Hardware Haven.

Good luck with your upgrade,

Terry O'Shanassy