SATA or PATA or BOTH!?

[terrelli]

My current configuration is 1 x optical drive and 2 x 80GB maxtor PATA HDs, one is for the system, the other is used as back-up. However my system HD is getting full and i would like to upgrade to 200GB but i am not sure whether to go for SATA or stay with PATA? Some of my concerns are:

1. Could i run both PATA and SATA drives on the same motherboard? So that i had my system on a 200Gb SATA, and continue to back-up on the 80Gb PATA. I have a Asus A78NX 2.0 motherboard.

2. If i could do the above, how easy is it to configure my system to boot from SATA instead of PATA, which is the way it is setup at present.

3. I have alot of stuff on my current 80Gb system drive, should i use something like Norton Ghost to clone my current drive onto a new drive?

 

[jammydodger]

1. Yes, PATA drives and SATA drives can be used at the same time (how else would your CD drives work).

2. Very easy, set the 1st boot priority to SATA or onboard PCI device (it might be called something else I dont have your motherboard).

3. If you want.

 

[terrelli]

Excellent, thank you for your advice, all i need to do now is decide on which 200Gb SATA HD to buy, Hitachi or Maxtor..........

 

[pat]

"is decide on which 200Gb SATA HD to buy, Hitachi or Maxtor........."

Seagate ..


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[terrelli]

I read in a few reviews that because the seagate 7200.8 utilises larger size platters then the access times is longer compared to other equivalent maxtor and hitachi drives.

 

[pat]

Seagate is the only manufacturer that still offer a 5 years warranty.. So, even if I could save 1 or 2 seconds/day by using a Maxtor or a Hitachi, I would still prefer reliability over performance in that case..


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[jammydodger]

WD are also very reputable. I have 2seagate drives and 1WD drive and I have never had any probs with any.

 

[RichPLS]

I agree, a 5 year warranty is nice, but it would depend on how reliable the drive is, for I would not want to exchange drive 2 or 3 times through the duration of that warranty period. I would want the drive to run reliably for 5 years with no exchange.

Maxtor Maxline III drives have 3 year warranties.

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[jammydodger]

I dont think seagate would offer their drives with a 5year warrenty if they didnt expect the majority to last for 5years. Otherwise they would loose a hell of a lot of money replacing defunct drives.

 

[sjonnie]

I think there's more to it than that. I'm sure all manufacturers have as low a <A HREF="http://faq.storagereview.com/tiki-index.php?page=MTBF" target="_new">MTBF</A> as they can manage within their budget and it's not going to be very different between manufacturers (Deathstars were the exception). Warranty is just a way of marketing your drive. Consider, your drive batch has a MTBF of 500,000hrs. That means 1 disk in every 57 you sell is going to fail within 1 year. Now you have two options. You can put a 1 year warranty on the drive and price it such that you incorporate the cost of 1 RMA per 57 drives. Alternatively, you can put a 5 year warranty on the drive and price it to incorporate the cost of 5 RMAs per 57 drives. Hence 5yr warranty drives cost more than 3 yr warranty drives which cost more than 1yr warranty drives. It's not that the drives are made any differently, it's just marketing and profit margins.
The exception of course is Enterprise class drives which have an MTBF of 1.2million hrs.

 

[jammydodger]

Alternatively, you can put a 5 year warranty on the drive and price it to incorporate the cost of 5 RMAs per 57 drives

I think you might be over simplifying it a little bit. The older a drive gets the more prone it is to failure, 1 year old drives dont fail very often. However once a drive gets to 5years old it is far more likly to die than when it was 1year old.

1year: 1 in 57 drives die
3years : 6 in 57 drives die
5 years : 15 in 57 drives die
Thats not based on any fact, its just purly speculation on my part, but I think its more likly.

My point is that if you offer a 5year warrenty you would have to know a good proportion of your drives are up for the task.

 

[sjonnie]

Yeah, I don't think either of us know exactly how more prone a drive is to failure after 5yrs vs. 1 yr.

I do know the hard drive manufactuers say a drive is much more likely to fail early in life due to manufacturing defect or damage sustained during transit. Once installed and left alone a drive can keep on working for years. That was the basic rational for dropping the long warranty on hard drives in the first place (most electronic devices are warrantied for 1 year).

I'm pretty sure that desktop drives have a fairly high MTBF, especially with the new fluid bearings. Companies don't actually publish figures for their drives but they are likely to be pushing the 1,000,000 mark these days which is almost enterprise class where 5yr warranties are standard.