SATA Compatibility & Speeds

[marshahu]

I have been more than patient putting up with a cramped 10GB ATA 66 Hard drive for 2 years running. Also my sister's PC is playing up so I need a new hard drive for that pc as well.

I have considered Western Digital or Seagate Hard drives however I wanted to make the move to SATA Drives but my motherboard doesnt have support for it. I will be upgrading to a motherboard with SATA support and loads of other features soon so I dont really want to waste PCI slots with SATA controllers, esp. when my PC has conflicts galore.

I must have read from somewhere that Serial ATA drives are comaptible with the old standard. Does this mean that I can buy a Serial ATA drive and plug it into a standard ATA controller. I wanted to do this for the time being until I get my new motherboard (I am also using this as a good opportunity to get my hands on the new processor either an Intel Extreme or AMD 64/64 FX).

Also I read that Serial ATA drives can achieve speeds of up to 600mbs second. However the market has only gone as far as 150MB so I will need to wait a long time for the motherboards to intergrate 600 SATA controllers. When that happens Ill pocket one of them boards and get myself a SATA 600 drive and set that as my master hard drive to speed things up.

My question is when will there be some 600mb hard drives on the market and when will m/b manufacturers start incorportating SATA 600 controllers?

The Hard drive I want to purchase is a Western Digital 1200JD with 8MB Buffer. Please submit opinions and better drives if neccessary

Just cos I am a semi skinhead it does not mean that I am a semi PC Guru. I am 25% PC Guru, 15% Thug and 10% Alcoholic!!!

 

[Crashman]

LMAO! The FASTEST SATA drives still barely go over 70MB/s. There is no speed advantage to SATA with current drives.

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[marshahu]

So what your saying is that I shoudl stick to an oridnary ATA 133 Hard Drive until maybe this time next year?

Regarding the compatibility question, if I did chose to get an SATA drive would I be able to use it with a standard ATA 133 interface

Just cos I am a semi skinhead it does not mean that I am a semi PC Guru. I am 25% PC Guru, 15% Thug and 10% Alcoholic!!!

 

[Crashman]

If you had a board with all the IDE headers full, and a couple SATA headers you could use to add another drive, I'd say go SATA (rather than buy an IDE card). But that's because the hardware is already there.

Western Digital has the Raptor series, a low capacity, high speed drive available only in SATA (even though it's not too fast for IDE). Other than the desire to use that drive, there isn't a performance advantage to SATA right now. And if that drive were also available in IDE, both versions would have the same performance.

Drive transfer rates seem to double around every 3 years. That means that ATA133 should be faster than any ATA/SATA drive for at least 2 years. And ATA100 should be faster than any ATA/SATA drive for at least another year.

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[cpuNOz]

Wtf? I am now totally lost LOL
I was thinking about geting 2 wd 8 meg Sata-150 :120gig drives
and runing them in raid 0, 32kb sectors. Will this be a huge performance increace for gameing and os speed ? Or a waste of $$ .I have the P4P800 delux so it HAS Sata raid 0,0+1 on board. Ps Seeing they are new drives what are your "data coruptive" thoughts on 240 gigs in raid 0 ??? Is it realitiveley safe or a really bad idea?? Thanks for the reply's :?

 

[Crashman]

Going with SATA drives is often a great idea if you have SATA connections already, and have other uses for your IDE connectors. In fact, my next hard drive might be SATA simply so I can make use of the ICH5R controller on my new motherboard, and use the IDE headers for optical devices.

Raid 0+1 is both fast and redundant. You could use 0 simply to make your drives faster, but there is a small chance of drive failure with any drive.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[cpuNOz]

Thanks I Think I'll go with raid 0 for performance I will X my fingers not to get a hd failure "nock on wood: But will I see a better performance increase with raid 0 ? PS I will Be disableing my pagefile as I will be running a gig of ram
Thanks

 

[Crashman]

Raid 0 usually adds significant performance to your drives with minimal impact on CPU performance, but how much you gain on the hard drive and loose on the CPU depends on the controller itself.

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<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[marshahu]

Thanks guys - looks like I will be stuck with ATA anyway. My motherbaord is a basic ECS A7S5A so I will only be able to get an ATA 133 with no RAID or nothing. I was going to install Windows XP on the new hard drive (I have a rather buggered version version of Windows ME on my current drive)

If I installed the new hard drive as slave (with Windows XP) and kept the old one as master will I be able to boot into Windows Me and copy the new files onto the slave hard drive. In other words when it starts will it automatically boot into the master hard drives Windows Me and ignore the Windows XP installation on the slave disk? I dont want to have to create partitions cos i only want one OS
I want to put the other hard drive in another PC which has a completetly broken hard drive.

Thanks for your help though


Just cos I am a semi skinhead it does not mean that I am a semi PC Guru. I am 25% PC Guru, 15% Thug and 10% Alcoholic!!!

 

[Crashman]

Yes, just make sure you jumper the drives properly (some drives require a different setting for "master with slave attached" than "single", while others don't. And "Cable Select" doesn't always work").

Then you have to partition and format the new drive before you can use it. Transfer all your files over and you'll be set.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>

 

[Crashman]

Oh, I should mention that you can't install XP on the slave then move it to master, the XP boot loader would be on the original master. If you want to install XP first, I suggest you make the new drive master and the old one slave.

<font color=blue>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to a hero as big as Crashman!</font color=blue>
<font color=red>Only a place as big as the internet could be home to an ego as large as Crashman's!</font color=red>