SATA and ATA Hard Drives 1

[Guaicaipuro]

Hi

I write this thread because i have the following question and hope that someone can help me understand.

I have a ASUS P4C800 Deluxe Motherboard with a P4-2.66 CPU and 1Gb RAM. Two Hard drives, one a Seagate Serial ATA 160Gb and the other UDMA100 IBM 120 Gb. When i benchmark the drives (with more then one program), the results show that the UDMA100 disk it's faster (reading and writing) than the SATA disk. I dont understand the results. Can anybody tell me if there is something wrong?

I thanks in advance for your help.

 

[cdogg]

That's correct! There's rarely a difference in performance between drives that use either SATA, ATA/133, and ATA/100. The reason is because the fastest ATA drives rarely peak above 70MB/s in read/write access and average around 50MB/s at best. The overhead provided by SATA and ATA/133 isn't needed [red]yet[/red].

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

 

[Guaicaipuro]

Hi cdogg
first of all thanks for your concern. What i dont understand is why a drive with a transfer rate of 150Mb/s is slower than the other with a rate of 100 Mb/s.

what are the advantages of SATA drives?

Sorry for my english

 

[cdogg]

Yes, SATA is 150MB/s and ATA/100 is 100MB/s. However, you're talking about the interface and not the drive. ATA hard drives that spin at 7200RPM only max out at 70-75MB/s on read and write access. The ATA/100 interface is still fast enough to accomodate these speeds.

SATA and ATA/133 are nice to have for future upgrades when drives get faster. But until then, it is not necessary to have SATA. It doesn't make the drive faster.

Does that make sense?

__________________________________________________

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

 

[Guaicaipuro]

Ok now i understand. And yes it make sense.

Thanks again

 

[paparazi]

When I was a small boy I had a facination for cars, I would look through the windows of parked cars and say to my father "look at this one dad, it can do 160mph" well of course, that was just what the speedometer was built to read upto.
Sorry for the analogy Martin

Of course those diddy cables make for a tidy case.

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