Ipod help and two random questions

[gaming monkey]

I have an ipod shuffle, and soon I'll be getting a new hard drive. Will I be able to transfer the songs saved on my ipod over onto my new hard drive? I don't want to lose the songs I bought from itunes.
As you can see I'mnot an expert at this stuff, and I just need to know if I can before I go ahead and do it.


Also, I have a question that has nothing to do with my ipod but thought I'd ask it in ths thread. How do I know if my computer has direct X 9 or whatever. Because I want to buy world of warcraft I'm just not sure if I meet the requirements.

Also, one more completely random question. Does it matter what drive I save world of warcraft to? I mean, it doesn't have to be saved on the C drive, it could be saved, to D or E drive right? How about an external hard drive?


I'd be very grateful for your help.

[Yeldarb]

You can copy songs from your iPod to your hard drive with third party programs like copyPod.

Go try to download Direct X 9 from Microsoft, it's free.

[kirupa]

I don't know about the first one, but I'll take a crack at your last two questions:

1.) To check for dx version, go to Start | Run | type dxdiag.exe and press Enter. On the summary page, the last item should be DirectX Version.

2.) You can install stuff on a removable drive, but you are better of keeping it on an internal drive instead. Games like WoW probably shuffle a lot of data back and forth from the hard drive, and you would need a drive that wasn't slowed down further by a USB2.0 or FW connection. At least that has been my experience with them.

:smirk:

[GW02]

Nah, ignore Kirupa's last comment here. (sorry, Kirupa! :P)

When you plug a drive inside your computer, its datarate ranges from 100Mbps to 150Mbps depending if you're on ATA or SATA.
Firewire and USB 2.0 are already up to 800 and 480Mbps, respectively, so it's about the same. Drives aren't reading anywhere near 100Mbps quite yet anyways. :)

[gaming monkey]

I don'nt have enough room on my C drive, but how about my D and E drive? I have plenty of room on those, but a friend told me that you can only save games onto the C drive, is that true?

[λ]

Nah, ignore Kirupa's last comment here. (sorry, Kirupa! :P)

When you plug a drive inside your computer, its datarate ranges from 100Mbps to 150Mbps depending if you're on ATA or SATA.
Firewire and USB 2.0 are already up to 800 and 480Mbps, respectively, so it's about the same. Drives aren't reading anywhere near 100Mbps quite yet anyways. :)

USB2 is 480 Megabits per second, and Firewire 800 is ~800 Megabits per second - ATA can range from 16.7 Megabytes per second to 133 MB/s. SATA goes up to 150 MB/s.

Converted to MB/s, USB2 is 60 MB/s and Firewire 800 is 100 MB/s - so USB2 and Firewire 800 are slower than SATA and slower than a lot of forms of ATA.

[Krilnon]

I think Serial ATA 2 can go up to 3Gbits... which is like 375MBps.

[λ]

I think Serial ATA 2 can go up to 3Gbits... which is like 375MBps.

Yup :) I neglected to mention SATA2 because SATA2 isn't used much yet (only really if you have an nForce4)

[ya3]

...what about ultrawide-scsi?

[gaming monkey]

Anyway back to my previous question. Could some of you answer that, I'm sure most of you know. =)


I don'nt have enough room on my C drive, but how about my D and E drive? I have plenty of room on those, but a friend told me that you can only save games onto the C drive, is that true?

[ya3]

yes yes yes, of course you can install stuff to other HD's. just do it.

[gaming monkey]

thank you ya3, quick simple answer, that was what i was looking for.

[petefs]

back onto the offtopic:

For clarification, comparing asynchronous (ATA), synchronous (SATA), and isynchronous (firewire) busses that simply is misleading. There's a big difference between real-life sustainable throughput and maximum burstable throughput : )