Thats the same with any drive, I wouldnt say SATA are statistically worse for any reason. HDs are the most likley to be DOA, fail very soon after purchase component of a PC.

Just treat them very carefully. Dont wave them about. Install them so they are perfectly level with al 4 screws. Never move them or the PC when its on and running.

I have 4 sata drives here blazing away fine, not one problem.....Of course the best bit of advice I can give you is to back up ANYTHING important or valuble regularly to cd/dvd or whatever because any drive can fail at any time.

ten

And remember folks: Make sure you have cooling for the HD. If the disk is on fire all the time no wonder if there are problems. Get a heatpipe cooling for the HD's. Costs only about 20 euros per piece and in addition to cooling makes the HD even more silent (rubber shock absorbtion). Only negative thing is that you'll have to fit it into 5?" slot, which could be problematic if you have a small case.

Check out their websites for specs.

www.maxtor.com
www.asus.com

By the way is anyone here aware of the current chipset situation? NVidia or VIA?

Edit: Googling... http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4...a/index.x?pg=1

I studied this SATA & NCQ issue and found out that the NCQ drives are even about 30% faster than their corresponding non-NCQ counterparts. This means quite a nice boost compared to "traditional" PATA133 drives.

I also found out that SATA 2 drives and chipsets are released soon, which means 300MB/s transfer bus per disk, so SATA2 in RAID0 will be fast as hell making the top notch SCSI drives obsolete. Although I'm not sure how high those new SATA 2 drives will be priced.

I'd say nforce is the one to go for. I currently have an nforce 2 board and its very good. I don't know much about the chipsets themselves but I'd personally go for the nforce.

Nforce4 and Via K8T890 are the first chipsets that support NCQ SATA, so it's very much choosing between those two. On few reviews I noticed that the Nforce4 produces a lot of heat, so it requires good fan cooling which causes extra noise.

I couldn't find any Nfroce4 vs. K8T890 benchmark tests yet, but I think we'll get some when the K8T890 equipped mobos hit the stores with full force.

I did but I couldn't find any info.

It seems like all the new mobos that have NCQ have PCIe graphics.
I'm getting a new comp. but also an UAD-1 card, and on the UAD-1 webstite, they say that AGP is required (PCI graphics are not recomended).

Does this mean that I have to buy an old MOBO without NCQ to run the UAD-1 card?

Try to get a silent fan for your PC. If you're making tunes you want any external noise at a minimun. The fan on my PC sounds like a chainsaw every time I start it up and it seriously p****s me off.

I'd be inclined to go for NVidia as I have a Via chipset and when I got my Audiophile 2496 I was told there could be issues with the Via. As it happens - it works fine but apparently some users of Via chipsets experience problems when they get new soundcards.