SATA hard drive?

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mikewahlquist

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i see a lot of you put the high performance SATA drives in your recording computers. does an SATA drive require a special controller or can i just pop it in my fairly new DELL and use the existing IDE/ATA controller that came with the computer??? Thanks. :o :rolleyes: :eek: :p
 
your motherboard needs to have an SATA connection since you're connecting a serial device...not a parallel one.
 
bennychico11 said:
your motherboard needs to have an SATA connection since you're connecting a serial device...not a parallel one.
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by 'SATA connection' do you mean a controller card or something else? :)
 
You can purchase an after market SATA controller that will plug into your PCI bus. Here is an example for $40. Most (not all) new motherboards come with SATA controllers, as well as EIDE controllers, built in.
 
Unless your mother board's chipset natively supports SATA, I wouldn't use an add-in PCI controller nor would I use SATA offered via a Silicon Image chip on the mobo.
At least not in a DAW, it will cause nothing but trouble for the soundcard.
 
SATA is soooo much faster then IDE. I had 2 8mb 7200 IDE WD and swapped them for SATA WD, the difference in speed and plug-in/track count was NOT a small one. I"m LOVING it.
 
Teacher said:
SATA is soooo much faster then IDE. I had 2 8mb 7200 IDE WD and swapped them for SATA WD, the difference in speed and plug-in/track count was NOT a small one. I"m LOVING it.
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How much is a HUGE difference, Teacher? do you mean in performance or you can get a higher track count on mixes or what?

I have 2 Maxtor 8mb 7200 IDE drives, 80Gig for the system and 160Gig for recording onto. I thought about upgrading to a SATA for my recording drive. I have a P4 3.0Ghz on an ASus P4P 800 E DELUXE with 2x 512Meg DDR400 and I run Cubase SX.... After I get to 24+ tracks the performance bar for the disk is in the red while the CPU bar sits about 40/50%

Would the SATA drive save my disk performance?..and can I run an IDE drive and an SATA drive at the same time?
 
SATA isn't faster than IDE, as far as I know. I can't explain Teacher's improvement (perhaps he upgraded to 10K drives), but SATA and IDE are the same technology only delivered differently. I've read at many tech sites that there really is no reason to upgrade to SATA unless you are buying new HD's and want to use RAID or you like the skinny cable associated with SATA.

And yes, you should be able to run IDE and SATA at the same time. Optical drives (CD/DVD) are all still IDE and work in all SATA systems.
 
It's not the RPM speed that counts - it's the data xfer rate.

In a world where everything is paralleled, going back to a serial interface allows for a dedicated transfer. With SATA, you CAN get the 1.5GB/s transfer rate that EIDE cannot achive due to buss loading.
 
Dethska said:
SATA isn't faster than IDE, as far as I know. I can't explain Teacher's improvement (perhaps he upgraded to 10K drives), but SATA and IDE are the same technology only delivered differently. I've read at many tech sites that there really is no reason to upgrade to SATA unless you are buying new HD's and want to use RAID or you like the skinny cable associated with SATA.

And yes, you should be able to run IDE and SATA at the same time. Optical drives (CD/DVD) are all still IDE and work in all SATA systems.
Click to expand...
Well, right now you are largely correct. SATA isn't faster than PATA right now, but it does have the potential of providing faster throughput, whereas PATAs top speed has already been achieved.
 
I do need to mention that I did put it in RAID 0 config which is supposed to increase performance, and i also installed a gig of 1gig 3200 ram,(where i was previously using 512 2700) so the amount of performance i gained maybe skewed a lil bit.

But I thought SATA was running at 150mb/sec while at least my older IDE ATA were running @ 100mb/sec that doesn't account for anything

Well in short when I had the older ram and HD's projects that were at 100% + cpu limit dropped to like 60-70%

if thats not dramatic i don't know what is ;)
 
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