SATA vs. EIDE/ATA

[Tim Brown]

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.

Thanks,

That is exactly what I wanted to know. I wasn't sure if they were making SATA DVD and CDR's and I just hadn't seen them on the market yet.


Tim

 

[sile2001]

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

The difference is so marginal that I doubt it could even be noticed, and most measurements of it would be questionable. When people talk about the slowness of writing in a RAID array, the are talking about it in comparison to the reading speed. RAID arrays read data very quickly because they can read asynchrously from all of the drives. If you read a file that is on both drives (whether mirrored or striped), it can read at full speed from both drives at once, getting you the file in almost half the time (there is some operational overhead).

Writing to the drives, however, must be syncronous with the exception of RAID 0 arrays (which are not fault-tolerant). In RAID 1 or 5 configurations, the same data must be written to more than one drive, so there is no benefit to multiple drives. That said, the RAID controller is smart enough to send the data to all of the drives at once, so there is no significant drop in speed versus having only a single drive. If it had to write the data to one drive first, and then to the next, then there would be a slowdown...but this is not the case.

 

[xstatic]

I have an SATA DVD-RW drive and so far it has been awesome. I had never seen my average write speed actually reach 36x before my SATA DVD-RW drive

 

[DarkCide]

Quick question. I have a 5 year old PIII computer and want to buy a new Hard Drive to use with my PC and a newer one which I will be buying in a few months. Can I use a SATA hard drive with a 5 year old motherboard? If not, do I need to buy anything to make it work?

 

[RWhite]

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.

Excellent answer. I get very tired of hearing people say "if you put a CD drive and a hard drive on the same controller, your hard drive slows down". That may be true if you bought your CD drive 6 years ago, but it is certainly not true today.

And for the record, the new Dell Optiplex's have a single IDE controller along with SATA. I guess they assume you will use your IDE only for your optical drives. I find it to be a pain in the ass.

And as for adding SATA to an older motherboard.... you can buy SATA controller cards from Promise, Maxtor, and others.

 

[dgatwood]

Excellent answer. I get very tired of hearing people say "if you put a CD drive and a hard drive on the same controller, your hard drive slows down". That may be true if you bought your CD drive 6 years ago, but it is certainly not true today.

You're technically right. However, I would caution that transfers between the CD drive and the hard drive (e.g. a CD rip) will be impacted dramatically. A lot of people misinterpret that as the hard drive speed being slower (because after all, "it's fast when I rip to another drive").

ATA works well with two devices as long as you only use one of them at a time....

 

[RWhite]

Close, ATA works well when you are only reading or writing - not both - on a single controller.

I set up all my systems as follows:

Primary Master - boot hard drive with OS
Primary Slave - DVD or CDR writer

Secondary Master - Fast large data hard drive
Secondary Slave - DVD or CD reader.

That way if you are either burning data from your data drive, duping DVDs/CDs, or moving between drives, you maximise your IDE performance. If you don't expect to be duping optical disks, just skip the secondary slave.