I have two serial hard drives Seagate ST3120026AS. I need to replace one of them because of it's age it's giving me some problems. I have a Western Digital WD500JBRTL which is EIDE. I don't understand the true difference between serial and parallel. Will I have a computability problem if I use the WD Digital.

It's just a different interface to the motherboard and the SATA is faster than the IDE.
Would depend on your motherboard and what your using it for.
Your mb may not let you boot from it ,but would probably be OK as a secondary drive if the mb has free IDE connections.
If your running araid array ,you'll might want to stick with the size drive you have to keep a balance.
Try it ,you'll not hurt anything.

the difference is in the data interface, cables are not similar. having two identical drives raises the possibility you have some sort of RAID or mirror arrangement. If the bum drive is not in a RAID array or mirror and it's not the drive the machine is booting from you can replace it with a an PATA. no biggie.

The drive I want to replace is the primary drive and I do boot from it.

That the right # for the WD - it's not showing up on the WD site:
http://www.wdc.com/wdsearch/search.aspx?sq=WD500JBRTL&sl=en-US&sc=

Can I have the model of motherboard? There may be some benefits from researching your board...

You may be able to go with RAID, add drives etc...

I took it back and got an WD SATA' 500 GB . When I got back into the car Leo Laport was talking about older motherboards not recognizing the bigger hard drives and to partition them. My motherboard is MSI P4 865PE/G Neo2 series which doesn't tell me a thing.


Thanks for all the help

It's just a different interface to the motherboard and the SATA is faster than the IDE.
Would depend on your motherboard and what your using it for.
Your mb may not let you boot from it ,but would probably be OK as a secondary drive if the mb has free IDE connections.
If your running araid array ,you'll might want to stick with the size drive you have to keep a balance.
Try it ,you'll not hurt anything.


Sata has a different cable and a different power supply cable. SATA vs IDE, is maybe a 1% difference in speed. Sata II on the other hand will be leaps any bounds, but of course you platters and spindle speed then come into play.

Big D

Here is a link to your board...

http://us.msi.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=865PE_Neo2-FIS2R&class=mb

You may want to install RAID which is very beneficial. To be simple you need to identical drives...best to just buy the exact same ones...