SATA vs. EIDE/ATA

[Tim Brown]

Okay guys,
I need some PC help.

I need to get a new Hard Drive and I'm debating about getting a SATA drive. My motherboard is an ABIT NF7-S. It is SATA capable.

My question is - if I switch to using the SATA Hard Drives, will I still be able to use the EIDE/ATA CDRW and DVD+R that I already have in the PC?

In otherwords - does using the SATA connections somehow override or disable the IDE connectors inside the PC?

I can't seem to find this information anywhere, and I don't want to go plop down $150+ on a hard Drive that won't work for my needs.



Thanks,
Tim

 

[bennychico11]

no, you'll be fine
the BIOS/OS just looks to see what is plugged in on your motherboard and what jumper settings they have. If you open up your BIOS it'll tell you what is connected to each port and under SATA right now it should read "none"...when you plug in your drive it'll change to say that drive's name.

 

[sile2001]

Benny nailed it. You can use both SATA and IDE/ATAPI drives at the same time. As a matter of fact, I'm doing it right now. My main drive with my windows installation is SATA, but my secondary drive (with my linux installation) and my DVD-RW drives are all IDE/ATAPI.

If you are adding the drive to an existing installation of windows, then you should be just fine. If you will be installing a new copy of windows on the drive, then you may have to follow some special steps in the windows installation to allow it to recognize the SATA controller. Check your motherboard manuals or their website for more info on that.

Really, there is no reason to buy IDE drives any more. SATA is slightly faster, even on 7,200 RPM drives, it is more resource-efficient, and now most SATA drives are cheaper than their IDE counterparts.

 

[guttapercha]

Yah - not a problem. I have that exact same board with:
WD SATA 80 G HD
and two DVDRs on the regular ATA BUS.

You'll need the SATA drivers for that board too. Apologies if this is redundant with another reply.

JD

 

[wheelema]

Well....

Let's explain a few things.

Serial ATA drives use a different interface on the mobo that Parallel ATA, they do NOT use the same interface. All well and good you may say, my mobo comes with both a SATA interface and a good 'ole regular ATA (PATA) interface... I'll just hook up my old PATA drive to the cable along with my CD/DVD (whatever) and it's all good.

Not exactly.

Performance U teaches us that hooking a HDD and an optical drive (CD, DVD, etc.) on the same cable drags the transfer speed of the fastest device (the HDD) down to the slowest transfer speed on the cable (the CD/DVD), so if you are really anal about keeping your system as fast as possible (AFAP?) you never chain disparate devices together. This does not apply if you are popping for SCSI devices, however.

For what it's worth.

Luck.

 

[Tim Brown]

Okay, then let me ask this - exactly what kind of cables do I need?

The Motherboard came with 1 SATA Cable and 1 "adapter".

Do I need 1 cable + 1 Adapter for each SATA HD I intend to add?

I just found 160G+8MB cache WD's for $70 each, so I'm thinking about a pair of them.


Thanks,
Tim

 

[Ford Van]

This does not apply if you are popping for SCSI devices, however.

That is not true. If you put a SCSI 2 CD drive on the same card as a SCSI UW2 hard drive, the hard drive will default to SCSI 2 speed, even if the card is UW2 capable. SCSI always works at the speed of the slowest device on the card.

There are many CD/DVD drives that work at UDMA Mode 5 (or higher? can't remember is mode 5 is ATA 133 or not). Anyway, in this case, the IDE bus will work at the full ATA 133 speed.

What would be true to say for ANY hard drive/optical media/tape media devices is that the bus will work at the speed of the slowest device on the bus. Generally speaking, CD drives can be the device that slows things down, but not always!

 

[sile2001]

Well....

Let's explain a few things.

Serial ATA drives use a different interface on the mobo that Parallel ATA, they do NOT use the same interface. All well and good you may say, my mobo comes with both a SATA interface and a good 'ole regular ATA (PATA) interface... I'll just hook up my old PATA drive to the cable along with my CD/DVD (whatever) and it's all good.

Not exactly.

Performance U teaches us that hooking a HDD and an optical drive (CD, DVD, etc.) on the same cable drags the transfer speed of the fastest device (the HDD) down to the slowest transfer speed on the cable (the CD/DVD), so if you are really anal about keeping your system as fast as possible (AFAP?) you never chain disparate devices together. This does not apply if you are popping for SCSI devices, however.

For what it's worth.

Luck.

Partly true, partly not. Yes it's true that putting a HDD and an optical drive on the same IDE channel will limit the channel to the speed of the slowest device. However, most modern-day optical drives (especially DVD drives) are being designed with this in mind and have a drive controller that operates at the rate of HDD's, even if the drive itself cannot provide data at that rate.

Also, even with the increasing prevalence of SATA, I have never seen a motherboard that didn't still have 2 IDE channels, so splitting the drives to separate channels isn't a problem. Even my Shuttle XPC mobo, designed for very small computers with few internal components has 2 SATA channels and 2 IDE channels.

As to the SCSI devices, this is definitely not true. The bus does slow down to the speed of the slowest device. AND, there is a maximum bandwidth that the SCSI bus is capable of, and that bandwidth must be shared between all the devices on the bus. In this manner, it's not all that dissimilar from USB and Firewire and the PCI bus, and every other bus that didn't have dedicated channels for each device.

 

[Ford Van]

Partly true, partly not. Yes it's true that putting a HDD and an optical drive on the same IDE channel will limit the channel to the speed of the slowest device. However, most modern-day optical drives (especially DVD drives) are being designed with this in mind and have a drive controller that operates at the rate of HDD's, even if the drive itself cannot provide data at that rate.

Also, even with the increasing prevalence of SATA, I have never seen a motherboard that didn't still have 2 IDE channels, so splitting the drives to separate channels isn't a problem. Even my Shuttle XPC mobo, designed for very small computers with few internal components has 2 SATA channels and 2 IDE channels.

As to the SCSI devices, this is definitely not true. The bus does slow down to the speed of the slowest device. AND, there is a maximum bandwidth that the SCSI bus is capable of, and that bandwidth must be shared between all the devices on the bus. In this manner, it's not all that dissimilar from USB and Firewire and the PCI bus, and every other bus that didn't have dedicated channels for each device.

Errrrrrrrrrr....did I just say all this in the thread above your?

 

[sile2001]

Ummmm........yeah...... Everything except the thing about boards still having 2 IDE channels and the bandwidth limit on the SCSI bus . I guess I picked up a bad habit of replying to certain posts without reading all the way through the rest of the posts

 

[xstatic]

Most likely if you have an adaptor concerning SATA, it is probably for power, and not data.....

 

[altitude909]

Yep, good point. SATA devices will have the standard molex 4 pin, the sata power connector (the thin little black one that looks like a mini IDE), or both. It is important to use one or the other.

 

[Ford Van]

Ummmm........yeah...... Everything except the thing about boards still having 2 IDE channels and the bandwidth limit on the SCSI bus . I guess I picked up a bad habit of replying to certain posts without reading all the way through the rest of the posts

Heh...no problem. Just seemed a bit redundant.

 

[dgatwood]

That is not true. If you put a SCSI 2 CD drive on the same card as a SCSI UW2 hard drive, the hard drive will default to SCSI 2 speed, even if the card is UW2 capable. SCSI always works at the speed of the slowest device on the card.

That's not correct. It's not correct for SCSI, nor is it correct for Firewire. (Well, technically, it is correct for the specific SCSI scenario you mention, but it isn't correct for SCSI in the general case.)

The maximum speed to/from a FireWire device is the minimum speed of any device that is involved in the transfer. If there's a 400 Mbit hub between two 800 Mbit devices, the maximum speed is 400 Mbit because the hub is involved in the transfer. However, if there's an 800 Mbit hub between two 800 Mbit devices, you could have a dozen 400 Mbit devices hanging off that 800 Mbit hub and the two 800 Mbit devices could still talk to each other at 800 Mbit.

For SCSI, while degrading the speed to that of the slowest device may be true for some controllers, it is not true for SCSI in general. I've seen spec sheets for controllers from LSI Logic that can run the bus at multiple speeds. Nothing in the spec says that the bus can't run at different speeds when talking to different devices. See Wikipedia's SCSI entry for confirmation of that....

The only guaranteed rule with SCSI is that no transfer to a given device will occur faster than that device can accept data. Until the device select line for a given device is set, the device is expected to ignore whatever is flying on the line. (Of course, I'm talking parallel SCSI here. I'm not sure about Fibre Channel.)

 

[jdwoodward]

If you mother board is SATA capable you shouldn't have any problems. Your DVD, CD Rom drives are still going to be IDE connections. They are plugged to your MOB with the wide grey ribbon cable to the IDE interface. An SATA drive will be plugged to the MOB with a round cable that goes to the small rectangular Serial ATA connection. If your board does not have these, you can get a PCI serial ATA card and istall the hard drive with that.

 

[Ford Van]

That's not correct. It's not correct for SCSI, nor is it correct for Firewire. (Well, technically, it is correct for the specific SCSI scenario you mention, but it isn't correct for SCSI in the general case.)

The maximum speed to/from a FireWire device is the minimum speed of any device that is involved in the transfer. If there's a 400 Mbit hub between two 800 Mbit devices, the maximum speed is 400 Mbit because the hub is involved in the transfer. However, if there's an 800 Mbit hub between two 800 Mbit devices, you could have a dozen 400 Mbit devices hanging off that 800 Mbit hub and the two 800 Mbit devices could still talk to each other at 800 Mbit.

For SCSI, while degrading the speed to that of the slowest device may be true for some controllers, it is not true for SCSI in general. I've seen spec sheets for controllers from LSI Logic that can run the bus at multiple speeds. Nothing in the spec says that the bus can't run at different speeds when talking to different devices. See Wikipedia's SCSI entry for confirmation of that....

The only guaranteed rule with SCSI is that no transfer to a given device will occur faster than that device can accept data. Until the device select line for a given device is set, the device is expected to ignore whatever is flying on the line. (Of course, I'm talking parallel SCSI here. I'm not sure about Fibre Channel.)

Upon further review, yes, you are correct, sort of. Technically: (this is from your same wikipedia entry)

Compatibility

Note: Ultra-2, ultra-160 and ultra-320 devices may be freely mixed on the LVD bus with no compromise in performance, as the host adapter will negotiate the operating speed and bus management requirements for each device. Single-ended devices should not be attached to the LVD bus, as doing so will force all devices to run at the slower single-ended speed.

So, ultra SCSI you can mix on the same LVD bus.

 

[Hi_Flyer]

I was under the impression that there were problems with using SATA drives for audio work... I can't remember the specifics, but is there any truth to that?

If I was gonna build a computer with a mobo that has two IDE channels and two SATA channels, how should I use them? Is this even a common configuration for mobos?

Say I want to hook up a DVD burner, an IDE drive (7200 RPM-I'm pulling out of an older PC), and then a new, fast drive. On which drive should I put the OS, and which drive should I put the audio files?

Yes, I'm planning on buying a new PC this year and I'm trying to figure this stuff out...

 

[fenderlady]

I was under the impression that there were problems with using SATA drives for audio work... I can't remember the specifics, but is there any truth to that?

If I was gonna build a computer with a mobo that has two IDE channels and two SATA channels, how should I use them? Is this even a common configuration for mobos?

Say I want to hook up a DVD burner, an IDE drive (7200 RPM-I'm pulling out of an older PC), and then a new, fast drive. On which drive should I put the OS, and which drive should I put the audio files?

Yes, I'm planning on buying a new PC this year and I'm trying to figure this stuff out...

Put the O/S on the IDE and do your data to the SATA. I have a server and I store all of my music files on a SATA RAID array. But the O/S's for both computers are on IDE drives.

 

[bgavin]

RAID will generally be a slower write speed than a single drive of the same topology.

I run the NF7-S board, with an XP-2000+ processor and single WD1600JB drive. I used the drive because I got it for $39 new, not because I don't like SATA.

As it is, the system loafs at 3% CPU during tracking. SATA would be a faster data transfer, especially on a newer SATA-II board. I'm not I/O bound (yet), so cannot say if the IDE will be a limitation or not.

I removed all unnecessary Win services, apps, and eye candy from my dedicated DAW. I have a feeling the vast number of recovered cpu cycles will more than make up the difference in a slightly slower disk transfer rate. My memory footprint went from 128bm down to 53mb as a result of the tweaks.

Link to Tweaks Text Document Outline

The above text document is an outline form of the tweaks I found on the net.

 

[Tim Brown]

I picked up a pair of Western Digital #WD800JD SATA drives with the 8MB Cache at NewEgg.com for $104.

This isn just for My home/Internet PC so I didn't want to invest a ton of money in it.
Last year I got a Sony Digital Camcorder and a RICOH DVD burner and hadn't really played around with any digital video stuff, mainly due to lack of HD space. So one of these SATA drives is going to be the Main HD for the computer (Partitioned in half) and the second SATA drive is going to be for my video storage.

Now, I need to check out some el cheapo video editing software.


I just wanted to try to videotape some local bands, and see what kind of stuff I can learn to do on my own. I was registered at my local community college to take all these video courses - and after having the college drop the courses 3 semesters in a row due to "lack of student interest" (nobody signs up for these classes) I said to hell with it, and decided to teach myself how to do this.


Tim