upgrading motherboard

[amateur]

I am plaining to upgrade my motherboard .
its the 1st time i'm doin it and i've been reading lots
of stuff on it . Being an electronics engineering student
i believe i should be able to do it on my own but as i mention
i m doing this for the 1st time, there are many things that i
don't yet know, so i would really appreciate if anyone who can help me out.

theres this spec known as ATA-66 , it has
something to do with the hard disk right ?
i am retaining my hard disk . do i have to take note of whether the mb
can support my hard drive ? or any mb should be able to support any type
of hard drive ?

[Paleo Pete]

Most newer boards can support just about any type hard drive and usually they list it in the specs. so check out the specs for the motherboard before buying to be sure.

How to Build Your Own PC (http://sysopt.earthweb.com/buildpc/) might have some good info that will help so you can get an idea what you're getting into.

We can also give you lots of pointers here too, and my site posted below may have some other good links to check out.



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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)

[StoneDragon]

ATA-66 or UDMA66 are both pointing at the same thing... the rate at which data can be transfered to and from the drive. To the best of my understanding, this is the burst speed and in no way accurately reflects the sustained transfer rate of data. It is also my understanding that this is backwards compatable... you can still run a slower drive on an ATA-66 controler. You will only get the transfer speed of the drive though. You can't magically make a slower drive faster by hooking it up as ATA-66.

Another factor that I have read is that if you hook up both a slower drive (HDD or CD drive) and an ATA-66 drive to the same controller, the controller will default to the slower drive's speed. So you will not be able to get the performance out of the ATA-66 drive that you would normally be capable of.

[Paleo Pete]

Stone, I think you're right, on both counts. UDMA-66 is backward compatible, it would almost have to be, and if you've ever hooked up a CD ROM as slave to the hard drive you've seen what happens to access speed...

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If you had everything...Where would you put it?

Computer Information Links (http://www.geocities.com/paleopete/)