What is the serial ATA cable for? 3

[farley99]

My mother board came with a serial ATA cable. What is it for? i'd think hard drive but I dont see a place on the hard drive to plug it into, got any tips?

 

[bcastner]

A serial ATA Hard disk drive.

 

[cdogg]

farley,
Unless you own a Serial ATA hard drive, then don't worry about it. Keep it in case you need it down the road when you decide to buy a new hard drive that uses the new interface.

Also, don't assume that you should run out an buy a Serial ATA drive. Serial ATA is just a new interface that allows for faster transfer rates. However, even the fastest hard drives on the market right now don't need it, because IDE ATA100 and ATA133 currently provide a fast enough interface. It's there for the future...


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

 

[marcdoyle]

if you're going to buy a new drive, then go with SATA, it is noticeably faster and you can form a RAID if you get two of the same model of hard disk, but like cdogg said, no need to replace what you have right now.

 

[cdogg]

One last note:
A 7200RPM SATA drive will perform pretty much the same as its 7200RPM IDE counterpart. I've seen benchmarks that prove SATA has nothing to offer for most hard drives available today.

However, the only two exceptions I know of are:

1) Western Digital's new 10,000RPM SATA Raptor hard drive. It blows everything off the chart and needs the SATA interface. The downside is disk capacity. This new drive is currently only available at 36GB.

2) Certain RAID configurations can benefit from SATA or ATA133 over the aging ATA100 interface, though you may only notice the difference in a synthetic benchmark.


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

 

[christease]

As cdogg noted there are exceptions. I have two Raptors on Raid 0. They are very fast. They are very quiet at 10,000 rpm. On many of the Asus boards you can run both the serial and IDE. The raid configuration is also available. In this case when purchasing a new hard drive you may as well go with the new technology and buy serial.