Watch out for RAID systems. I have an on-board RAID controller and it chopped my sound to pieces when i recorded. After fighting with this problem for a month or two i disabled my RAID-controller and put my hard-disks on the normal ATA133 bus instead. Now everything works fine. I also heard about people having trouble with SATA-systems but i don?t have any experience with this. If you dicide to build a system yourself check this page first: http://www.pcmus.com/. I found it very usefull when having trouble with my sound...

About thore 10k Raptor drives someone mentioned: they are about the same speed as 7200rpm SATA Maxtors. Overhyped drives I say.

The new Maxtor drives Ten mentioned are very good and bloody fast, especially on RAID. There is no such recording and sampling task that could get that RAID setup down. The bandwidth is insane.

This is why getting a good motherboard is cruicial. Crappy motherboard surely will cause this kind of trouble. Don't spare in motherboard. Abit motherboards have worked very well.

i have built my new pc 2 monts ago and i am really happy with it.
i have :
- Asus A7N8x-E DeluxeWiFi Edition which really rocks for the price
- AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton
- 512Mo Kingston RAM
- 120Go Maxtor HD
- my old Audiophile 2496 sound card

i hesitated between SATA and classic ATA hard drives, and finally i bought a normal ATA! actually, the bus frequency is only 15Mo higher than normal drives and i don't think that is a real big difference! SATA is quite new and i didn't want to bother myself with it, knowing that i will certainly move my hard drive to different PCs, not necessarly equiped with SATA ports.
And what discouraged me too is that SATA drives warm very quickly, the Maxtor Diamond 9 had that problem according to a friend of mine, and that's one of the fixes they released in the Diamond 10.
Anyway, the choice of SATA or ATA is a personal opinion i think, as far as i was concerned, for only few Mo of difference, i chose to use a classic drive.
The machine is until now stable, i didn't get any blue screen of death and crossed fingers!! ;)

SATA drives have more than that 17 megas extra badwidth. For example that NCQ boosts performance nicely. SATA is the best choice around.

how much bandwidth does an affordable disk have ?

The bandwidth is that 150MB/s, but the IO functions are better which boost performance.

I'm getting two of these:
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B250S0 250Gb 7200rpm 16Mb S-ATA

Do they support NCQ

Are they good, or should I get something else?

Oh, and does ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe MOBO support NCQ ?

Yea they are very good drives and support NCQ. Make sure your motherboard sata controller supports NCQ, or PCI sata controller supports NCQ though or they will not run in NCQ mode.

ten

Be warned about SATA drives.

I once had a SATA drive fail on me and I lost all data which was annoying to say the least. This also happened to a friend of mine who knows his stuff about computers. So just that you know, SATA gives better performance but I am cautious to use them after the failure i encountered. If you want reliabililty, stick with IDE.