Is SATA HDD any good for bootup drive?

[purple buzz]

okay, so I just upgraded my computer. and i'm still running old IDE as a windows drive. and I'm giving my old PC to my uncle and will be passing that drive to him as well. however, I have 1 SATA drive for backup storage.

are SATA drives good for bootups? reason why I ask is because back when I built my PC, around 2003, SATA was difficult to set up to boot up with. you had to do some special tunning or something. is it still hard nowadays?

also, i looked around and there is so many different SATA drives. there is 1.5gb/s, 3.0, 6.0.. does it really make that big difference? there is also SAS 3gb/s? wth is that? there is also "ultra" types. man.. i'm so behind technology. but anyway, let me know if you guys can help me out cuz i'm looking to get a new drive possibly 200 or 250 gb just to boot and backup. thanks!

 

[Jonmor68]

If you are buying or building a new pc it will depend on which oS you are going to use.
SATA's don't have a problem booting, but if you are going to be using XP, then you will either need a sata driver on floppy from the motherboard maker or use PATA compatability mode set in bios, if it's an older mobo without that option you will need the driver, in addition you will need a XP disk that has at least Service Pack 1 incorporated on it to be able to use sata.
If you are going to be using Vista or Windows 7 the there won't be a problem.
In the real world you are not going to notice a big difference in speed of most of the drives unless you going to be working with very large amounts of data. You mention 200-250GB that's not much now, don't even think about anything less then about 500GB as the difference in price won't buy you very much, best to have more then you need then to run short.
It's surprising how quick you can fill them up with music, photos and video clips or movies.
Newegg Seagate 1.5 TB $80, http://www.newegg.com/Store/Category.aspx?Category=15&name=Hard-Drives

 

[jitpublisher]

Let me add to all that good info ^, you don't always need a SATA driver for XP.
You can enter the BIOS and set the SATA controller mode to "Native" or "emulated" IDE mode instead of AHCI mode.
XP will find the drive and install just fine. Not using AHCI mode simply means the drive will not be able to use some of the advanced features SATA drives support. Hot swapping and native command queing are main things. But the speed of the drive will still be far superior to an older standard IDE drive.
XP before SP1 has another issue which is not limited to SATA drives, it has this problem no matter what kind of drive you have. It cannot utilize over 137gig on a drive. If you put a 500gig drive in, and try to load a version of XP that doesn't contain Service Pack 1, it will only see 137 (or 127 I cannot remember exactly right now) gig of it. If your XP version is SP1 or later, you will not have this particular problem.

 

[purple buzz]

Best answer selected by purple buzz.

 

[Guest]

Why don't you try Acronis True image for back up?