Computer advice

[Potoroo]

Originally Posted by GT182

Here's my 2 cents. Go with whatever you're comfortable with and can afford. But, everyone has their own opinion, you have to make the choice yourself.

It's true everyone has their own opinion. However, some opinions are based on many years of experience in IT. And some aren't.

The newest SATA2 I believe, tranfers data at 3mb/sec versus 1.33 for IDE and 1.5 for SATA.

You're confusing theoretical bus rates with sustained throughput rates. Your average 7200rpm home HD simply can't provide data fast enough to sustain 3Gb/s (300MB/s). They can't even sustain 1.5Gb/s (150MB/s). My Seagate ST3200826AS 7200.8 SATA drive peaks at 67MB/s and averages 54MB/s on HD Tach's Sequential Read benchmark and it's a pretty good performer in its class. Once the disk cache is empty you lose the burst rate performance.

the Plextor DVD drives/burners are some of the best too.

Plextor have a premium brand name among CD/DVD manufacturers and charge accordingly. They've also been among the first to bring out SATA DVD drives but that's purely for convenience of installation and provides no actual performance benefit as a 16x DVD drive is even slower than a 7200rpm HD. That's why DVD drives still use Ultra DMA Mode 2 (ATA/33). The Plextor SATA DVD drives have also been the focus of numerous compatibility complaints.