SerialATA

[Grunt2002]

Hi,

I have read an article written for about 1 year that stated that there was no significant benefit from installing a sata drive through an adapter, condidering an ide-based mobo.

The article was not telling about sata mobo's that were still to come.

Now I am about to buy an a7n8x deluxe asus mobo, which supports sata. What kind of improvements could I retrieve from installing a sata150 8 mb cache disk compared to a pata133 8mb cache disk ? Is it worth the 50 $ difference ?

Thanks for posting,

Grunt

 

[Jontmke]

Very little. The limit they were refering to was that the sata cards were running on the pci bus which limited the speed to 133. The new MB will run at the sata default of 150 but in real time usage you will only get a 5% increase at most.
But if you have the cash it might pay to get it so that in 3 years (or whenever) when they stop making the old ide you can still use this hard drive.

Jon

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge. (Bertrand Russell)

 

[cdogg]

Grunt,
The important thing to realize is that current hard drive technology limits transfer rates in the max range of 70-80MB/s, and that's if you have the fastest drive reading small amounts of information stored in sequential clusters. Usually, however, they average anywhere from 30-45MB/s.

The ATA/100 and ATA/133 interface is still able to accomodate even the fastest drives and will continue to do so for quite some time. SATA's main advantage is slick-looking cables that actually take up less space. The extra headroom of 150MB/s vs. 133MB/s or 100MB/s rarely makes a difference in terms of performance.

But like Jon said, it won't hurt to have in the near future when companies slowly begin to phase out the aged parallel IDE interface.


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