A Good Hard Drive

  • Thread starter Thread starter bdemenil
  • Start date Start date
noise I think if your mobo supports SATA, get one of those.

If it doesn't, just get a regular pata drive. I wouldn't bother buying a sata controller, if the mobo doesn't have one. The improvement in performance is so marginal as to be almost not noticeable, unless you have high track counts
 
Bulls Hit said:
noise I think if your mobo supports SATA, get one of those.

If it doesn't, just get a regular pata drive. I wouldn't bother buying a sata controller, if the mobo doesn't have one. The improvement in performance is so marginal as to be almost not noticeable, unless you have high track counts
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Yes m0bo does have SATA its a Gigabyte 8IK1100. I'll stick with the current hard drive until i run out of room or need more tracks. What the differince between normal pata and sata with a mobo with sata controller?
 
Bulls Hit said:
noise I think if your mobo supports SATA, get one of those.

If it doesn't, just get a regular pata drive. I wouldn't bother buying a sata controller, if the mobo doesn't have one. The improvement in performance is so marginal as to be almost not noticeable, unless you have high track counts
Click to expand...

Thanks, but I'm not asking about SATA vs. PATA. I do have a SATA controller on my board and I'm wondering what the difference would be using the SATA controller instead of puting the hard drive on an IDE port like I normally would.
 
I think one of the biggest advantage is the cabling. SATA uses smaller cabling. This increases airflow which, in turn, would keeps your case cooler.
 
whattaguy said:
I think one of the biggest advantage is the cabling. SATA uses smaller cabling. This increases airflow which, in turn, would keeps your case cooler.
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I have compact, rounded IDE cables, so they really don't block airflow any more than an SATA cable would.

C'mon, you guys seem really knowledgeable about this stuff; somebody must know what the actual technical tradeoffs are between IDE and SATA? If they are the same, then what's the deal with having two different formats?
 
I found this tech paper on SATA:
http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is_11_22/ai_98977132

You'll maybe get slightly better performance from a regular 7200rpm drive in SATA. But make sure it's native SATA, and not converted from standard ATA (PATA). If you have the controller on your motherboard, I'd recomend using it. You'll defenitely get much better performance from a SATA drive than from a PATA HD sharing a ribbon with some other device. There's not much price difference between SATA and PATA anyway, might as well spend a few extra $$.

Where you'll realy see a difference is if you get a high end SATA drive like the WD Raptor - 10K rpm. This drive is much, much faster than any PATA HD.

The 36GB is about $100, and the 74GB is about $200. You shell out that kind of money for a processor or RAM, and trust me, this will help your performance just as much. I have 2 - boot from a 36, and use a 74 for audio. I also have a couple regular 7200 rpm drives for storage.
 
Okay, I think I'm confused here. Is PATA and IDE the same thing, because I thought ATA and IDE were two different formats?
 
Last I checked... Ata was topping out at 133mb/s... with most drives at 100mb/s throughput.

SATA specs to 150mb/s. They generally spin at the same rate..7200..but that isnt particularly relavant.

So..SATAs are better. Get them if you can afford them

LISTEN HERE, guys... get the best gear you can afford. (I usually go with not THE best... but, like, the second best)...THEN..when you run into the LIMITATIONS of your hardware...start innovating. Track more creatvly..bounce..whatever. Get your chops up. THEN upgrade.

you UNderstand??! Beck wrote a great album on less hardware than you have. In fact MOST albums that influenced my life were made on substandard gear, by todays standards. So f--ing cowboy up and make a great record. THEN complain about hardware.

xoxo
 
noiseportrait said:
Okay, I think I'm confused here. Is PATA and IDE the same thing, because I thought ATA and IDE were two different formats?
Click to expand...

PATA stands for Parallel ATA, which is the standard stuff we've all been using. It's gone through several iterations - ATA33, ATA66, ATA100, and now ATA133 - the numbers refer to the bandwidth they are capable of, with 133 reffering to 133 Megabytes/second. While this is higher than any PATA drive is capable at a sustained rate, they can burst data from their cache at that speed. Also, when two devices are on one ribbon, they share the bandwidth. PATA is sometimes reffered to as IDE. Technically, I'm not sure if SATA is also IDE.

SATA stands for Serial ATA. This is a new standard which is replacing PATA. The current version is 150MB/sec, but that will increase. I think the next planned iteration will be 300MB/sec. Among other things, SATA only allows one device per ribbon. This makes the interface more reliable, and insures each device full bandwidth.

On they high end, there are now SATA drives available that rival high quality SCSI drives.

Here's a useful article whith some definitions:
http://www.adaptec.com/worldwide/pr...chnology/Serial+ATA&prodkey=lta_serial_ata_UK
 
Thanks for clearing everything up bdemenil. That helped me out a lot. To SATA I go!
 
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