SATA Worth Upgrading to?

[Sour18]

Hey people,
Well I was just curious about SATA Drives, I know they are supposed to be able to
operate at something like 150MB\Sec. or something like that, but it seems like a
Marginal Gain for someone running an ATA133....

I myself, Have ATA100, one 60GB samsung and a 80GB Seagate Barricuda.
I have a Mobo that supports Raid (I865G), and I was wondering if there is some kind of
SATA - IDE adapter, and if there is, do I need to have a HD Designed for SATA? or
would I be able to hook it up and run at SATA speeds (Where is the BottleNeck)??

Thanks for Reading my long, and most likely retarded post..

[Captain Morgan]

I would say if you board already supports SATA and you need a new hard drive, go for it. But the speed difference I don't think is worth going out and switching over to SATA.

There are adapters for IDE drives to work on SATA boards, but I have heard the slow down performance. Also, I have some that none of my maxtor drives would work on, but my other drives worked fine with adapters.

[PorkchopExpress]

Originally Posted by Sour18

Hey people,
Well I was just curious about SATA Drives, I know they are supposed to be able to
operate at something like 150MB\Sec. or something like that, but it seems like a
Marginal Gain for someone running an ATA133....

I myself, Have ATA100, one 60GB samsung and a 80GB Seagate Barricuda.
I have a Mobo that supports Raid (I865G), and I was wondering if there is some kind of
SATA - IDE adapter, and if there is, do I need to have a HD Designed for SATA? or
would I be able to hook it up and run at SATA speeds (Where is the BottleNeck)??

Thanks for Reading my long, and most likely retarded post..

Do a search... We've answered this in great detail a number of times.

If you do a search and still have some questions unanswered (or more questions from what you learned) post again and we'll jump on it!

Here's a much easier answer. NO!

This Falcon came with 2-120GB Seagate SATA's, preconfigured as RAID Stripe 0. One of them just plain up and died. I lost quite a lot of programs and work. Now I have what's in my sig as Master/Slave. Two 100GB partitions each. The 1st partition of the Slave is a Ghost image of the C partition. Better safe than sorry. The difference in speed is hardly noticeable.

[Tritoph]

I want to go SATA over my current Ultra ATA 133 not because of faster speeds, but because of airflow and just plain annoyance. I hate the huge, rather unflexible IDE cables, even the round ones, they're a pain to manuveur well. A tiny little strip of wire is much sexier.

[bass_machine]

...and easier to break

Stick with ata133...

[PorkchopExpress]

Originally Posted by kzinti1

Here's a much easier answer. NO!

This Falcon came with 2-120GB Seagate SATA's, preconfigured as RAID Stripe 0. One of them just plain up and died. I lost quite a lot of programs and work. Now I have what's in my sig as Master/Slave. Two 100GB partitions each. The 1st partition of the Slave is a Ghost image of the C partition. Better safe than sorry. The difference in speed is hardly noticeable.

That's absolutely incorrect.

It sucks that you had a bad experience with your RAID setup, but RAID DOES add a great deal of performance for reads.

Forget about bus's for a second. Who cares that SATA gets 150 while PATA gets 13x. Todays storage technology is lagging way behind everything else in the computer industry.

The average Pata drive (singular) will give you an average disk read speed of 40+mb/s. That is sustained, not burst. This is the physical limitation of the disk. The head can only move so fast, and the disk can only spin so fast.

By running a RAID 0 configuration (with 2 disks) you have an extra head giving you reads. By using the same exact disk that would only give you 40+ mb/s, you now have an average read rate of 65+mb/s.

Single disk=40+mb/s
Raid 0 (2 disks)= 65+mb/s

SATA RAID was a breakthrough for the desktop world, as it used to be that only servers and highend workstations used disk striping (usually RAID 5 for striping + a spare).

As far as benefits for SATA over PATA....

The power consumption of SATA drives is less than PATA.

The cables are smaller, and thinner, allowing better airflow through your case.

The drivers are generally newer and streamlined for better performance.

I can understand the anger towards it though, it sucks losing all your data.

[Sour18]

Thanks guys,
Maybe I'll include it in the next PC I build for a Friend... but
I guess I was expecting people to say it is isanely faster or something...
ATA100 works for me...

[PeaceMakr]

I have it and I love it... Seems faster looks cleaner in the case and the small cable rocks.. If you need a new drive, go for it!