Is serial ATA hard drive worth the extra ?

[gusbrunston]

[tt]
Hi:

Have to replace my HD because of bad sectors. I just heard about "serial ATA drives". They're more expensive than the run of the mill 7200 rpm ATA IDE. Are they a lot faster? Other advantages?

I've been out of the loop since before USB 2.0 and "serial ATA", so any help you can offer will be appreciated.

Gracias,[/tt]

[tt] Gus Brunston - Access2000(DAO)[/tt] Intermediate skills.

 

[cdogg]

In a nutshell, no. SATA drives are not any faster.

Serial ATA and IDE hard drives use a lot of the same mechanisms with the exception of the interface, of course! Although the SATA interface shows some promise down the road, current hardware isn't fast enough to take advantage of it yet.

Should you upgrade from IDE to SATA? That's up to you and your wallet...


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein

 

[pavNell]

From my understanding there is little difference with the drives, but if you have a motherboard that supports SATA technologies and using a SATA drive,the speed difference is amazingly faster.

I asked some guru how SATA works and he said to imagine the hard drive heads reading/writing in a spiral fashion up and down the platters. This increases performance considerably because the heads don't have to wait for the disk to spin around again before they read/write the next bits of data.
At least that's what I was told.

 

[paparazi]

I'm afraid not! (amazingly faster) I don't think so.
But if you have SATA, and the differance in price is only slight where you are, then you should go with it but if your prices are anything like ours in the UK and the differance is 25-30% then don't bother, wait for the second generation of SATA with a real performance improvement and an equallity of pricing.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[gusbrunston]

[tt]
Thanks for all your comments. Because I (think) I would have to buy a new card for the SATA, I'm going to stick with what I know, a plain 7200 rpm IDE ATA.

Cheers,[tt]

[tt] Gus Brunston - Access2000(DAO)[/tt] Intermediate skills.

 

[ceh4702]

I can see no reason to pay more for a hard drive than you have to. SATA drives are not worth what they are asking for them. You would also need some way to connect the special Power Plug they use on these drives.

The SATA drives will not make programs run any faster or even deliver what they claim they can because the motherboards do not implement SATA drives as the Primary Drive IDE Ports. Most are using a slower pci connected chip, so they can not reach their true transfer rate speed. Even if they could, ATA 100 is fast enough for 1 or 2 hard drives. Drives spend more time reading and writing than they do actually transmitting data!

Dont wast your money.

If there is no benifit or return on your investment dont invest in a nowhere technology that is not needed. Your games will not play any faster, and your applications will not run any better.

If you do not like my post feel free to point out your opinion or my errors.

 

[dakota81]

Most current SATA drives are built for with the parallel interface, with the addition of a parallel to serial converter chip. No advantage.

Not even individual SCSI drives show much speed improvement over IDE drives. A single native SATA drive will not perform better than a single native parallel drive. It's in multiple drive raid configurations where the interface truely comes into play (I think), such as a 5 disk SCSI U320 array each disk churning out 50MBit/s.

I don't even know what to think of SATA right now; I'm soon going to be putting together a new computer of all new parts, and considered SATA, but there just too much to deal with. No cheap mobo supports it, gotta go expensive. No cheap PSU supports it, gotta buy an adapter. The drives run ~$20 more expensive than their identicle parallel counterpart.

Any minimal performance gains SATA brings at the moment, instead spend the extra $$ elsewhere, like a faster cpu or better memory timings and really see some larger performance gains. I also say the same thing about dual-channel ddr; new technology is not always the better choice.

 

[iamapollo]

Where I am in Perth WA the diff in price is non existent, they are the same for the same capacity. I am currently sourcing parts for a new computer and was going to try dual SATA drives in a raid 0 array. I was not aware of a different power connector so will need to check that out. I have to disagree with the contention to not worry about drive speeds and go for faster cpus etc because as I understand it the hard drive is the slowest component in the system and causes the bottlenecks. Paying a couple of hundred dollers mores for a faster cpu that shows no improvement because it is waiting for the hard drives seems pointless to me.

Being that the hard drive is the slowest component it would seem logical to me that any investment in speeding up this bottleneck will yield noticeable dividends system wide.

I can't see why not?

Michael

 

[paparazi]

Given that you can buy the two types at the same price, it would be silly not to go SATA, but what people are saying above is that the fastest IDE drives (Maxtors Special Edition 8mb cache, Deskstar GXP180's etc) are no slower than the equivelent SATA.
It would be a differant story if the comparison were with a budget 5,400rpm drive.
Don't be fooled by the ATA150 lable that SATA has, this is just like the maximum speedometer reading on a car (it doesn't mean it can actually do that speed) just that the interface is capable of carrying that much data flow.
Martin

Replying helps further our knowledge, without comment leaves us wondering.

 

[adaplant]

I just built a system using two WD Raptor 36 GB 10K RPM (non-native) SATA drives in a Raid-0 array on an Intel D865PERL MOBO with an Intel P4 3.0C CPU and 2 x 512 PC3200 RAM modules and an MSI GeForce FX 5600 128 MB VTDR AGP 8x graphics card.

Windows XP Pro installed in less than 10 minutes.

Fast? I've never seen anything like it before.

Pricy? Sure. But if this performance hold up, it will be worth it to me.

YMMV

 

[cdogg]

RAID arrays are a slightly different story. With the right array configuration, overall data transfer rates can edge closer to the ATA/100 limit. As a matter of fact, it's not uncommon to see read speeds close to 80 MB/s if not higher in RAID arrays.

In that scenario, it might help to have ATA/133 or ATA/150 (SATA) to allow for more headroom. Some benchmarks may give you satisfaction in knowing that the ATA/133 or ATA/150 helped, but I doubt you would ever truly notice the difference from ATA/100 on a day to day basis running your basic apps and games.


~cdogg
[tab]"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources"
[tab][tab]- A. Einstein

 

[wpfaff]

I would buy a SATS drive only if the motherboard has this capability. The serial to parallel converters are causing problems on older computers(made within the last 3 years).