Will my system be faster....?

[jonjon1123]

Hello,

I just recently bought a new Maxtor 250 gig SATA internal hard drive and a case and made it external. I also had to buy a SATA PCI card becasue my motherboard doesn't have any SATA ports. This PCI card has 2 SATA ports, one internal and one external. I am really happy with the speeds I am getting with the new external SATA drive hooked to the external port on the SATA card. I was wondering, would my computer run faster if I bought another SATA drive and copied everything from my current IDE hard drive to the new SATA one I would be buying and hooked it to the internal SATA port? Right now I have a P4 3.0 Ghz, 1.5 gig RAM, and a 160 gig IDE hard drive. It isn't super slow, but I would like it to be faster if possible. I have always heard "your computer is only as fast as your hard drive." Is this true? Would I see a significant performance boost? Can I do what I want to do? Thanks for any help.

-Jon-

 

[cdogg]

Unless you plan on striping at least 2 drives in a RAID array, you're not going to see that much improvement, if any. Many IDE drives are just as fast as their SATA counterpart.

There are some exceptions though. Newer SATA drives have some extra features like NCQ (Native Command Queuing) which can significantly speed up some transfers. However, it might not be worth the investment for the amount of increase it will give you.

And finally, using a 33MHz PCI SATA card doesn't help much either. The ceiling of 33MHz PCI is only 133MB/s which is shared by any other PCI card you have installed. So your SATA card has pretty much the same potential as the IDE interface you have now. The only plus would be extra features like NCQ if your hard drive or card supports them.

Most of your bottleneck right now is likely the amount of resources Windows has to work with. To see the difference, use your spare hard drive and install Windows as a fresh install. Boot from the drive and see how much faster everything else is. If it seems a lot faster, then starting with a fresh install might serve you best.

~cdogg
"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." - Albert Einstein
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[mainegeek]

jonjon1123,
I concur with cdogg. Also, there are several system maints that you can carry out routinely to help keep performance at its peak.

Keep your startup lean,diskcleanup,diskcheck,defrag,
dump temp and temp internet files and cookies, dump unknown and damaged browser objects. Keep the root clean other than system files. Educate yourself about the different processes running on your system and weather or not you need them running.Uninstall programs that you no longer use Check for ad and spyware. Secure your network and keep your hardware clean and cool.

Just to name a few........