Hard Drive - SATA 3.0GB vs. ATA 100

[UF Jspec]

I am looking to upgrade to an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 and BIOSTAR TForce965PT. I currently have a 3 month-old PATA hard drive and would rather not buy a SATA hard drive unless I have to.

I can boot from an IDE hard drive, right? Will there be a noticeable speed degradation over SATA? Thanks!

Jspec

 

[Teclis2323]

Yes, you should be able to boot using PATA fine.

SATA offers speed increases that range from slight to significant, depending on the drive that you purchase. I have been using a WDigital 16MB cache drive, and have found it to be significantly faster than my old PATA drive. THat being said, don' t look for a sudden powerhouse machine just because you made the switch.

Also, make sure that if you go with SATA, use the jumper that might or might not be on the back of the drive to indicate that you want to allow full 3 gb/s transfer speeds

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: UF Jspec
I am looking to upgrade to an Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 and BIOSTAR TForce965PT. I currently have a 3 month-old PATA hard drive and would rather not buy a SATA hard drive unless I have to.

I can boot from an IDE hard drive, right? Will there be a noticeable speed degradation over SATA? Thanks!

Jspec

regardless of what people say, if you have 2hdds, identical except that 1 is sata and 1 is pata, performance is the same. sata has a higher theoretical speed but that doesn't matter because todays sata/pata dds have a substained transfer rate of less than 100MB/s (ata100).

don't worry about it one bit, the pata drive is equal to the same sata drive you would have bought 3mos ago

in fact, only now has any single hdd had a substained transfer rate of over 100MB/s, and it is a u320 scsi/sas, the seagate 15k.5 series

 

[UF Jspec]

Thanks for the quick responses!!

 

[F1shF4t]

I got a 320gig 7200.10 seagate sata2 drive as well as a 250gig 7200.10 seagate ide ata100

Both have 16mg cache, and perform almost identically, with the 250 gig being slightly ahead.

Most of the time when people say upgrade to sata it also means getting a new hdd which more often will be faster than the old model. If the drives are the same then the interface wont make any difference what so ever.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I went to my first SATA drive a couple years ago, haven't purchased an IDE since. IMO, way faster...

 

[Philippine Mango]

SATA provides no benefit at this time other than it being serial instead of parallel which means fewer pins which means you don't have those wide cables. Though some will argue that having a parallel cable allows for custom folding and such which can make airflow better than with an SATA cable which is smaller overall. (SATA good for aircirculation for lazy people, not so good for those devoted to improving airflow in case)

I ran HDTach on my brand new 400GB Seagate drive with 16MB cache, was very impressed as it had a peak of 85MB/s with a sustained average of 60MB/s. (Much better than the peak of 45MB/s and sustained average of 33MB/s on my older 80GB drive circa 2000)
Forgot to mention that I own only PATA drives at this time

So it still shows that even the latest drives can't fill up the bandwidth of ATA 100 letalone ATA 133 which came with my older 80GB maxtor. Drives these days have ATA 100 with the exception being Maxtor because maxtor holds the licensing rights to ATA 133 which costs $$ and since there isn't a real benefit, manufacturers have stuck with ATA 100 except in certain drive controllers.

 

[JE78]

Originally posted by: ch33zw1z
I went to my first SATA drive a couple years ago, haven't purchased an IDE since. IMO, way faster...

I just got my first SATA a few days ago and its like night and day with IDE. I'll never go back to IDE.

 

[ch33zw1z]

cmon, group hug for the sake of SATA!

 

[boomerang]

Check how many IDE channels are supported by the motherboard you're looking at.

You may find that a HD and an Optical drive will max you out. All the 965 implementations I've looked at are like this. Something to consider.

 

[bob4432]

you guys that are saying sata is so much faster, what drives did you replace them with? i am sure more than a couple year old ide. you need to make this a fair comparison and do both current, identical drives. you are skewing the reality of this. it would be like me comparing my new 15k.5 to my old ata133 30GB maxtor hdd and actually being surprised that the new u320 drive with perpendicular recording is faster.....

Philiippine Mango - are you running a 7200.10 series? those are some good speeds

also, op for your next drive pick up a sata because as boomerang pointed out about the lack of ide ports on the new m/bs. it does look like the new nvidia 650 series of chipsets gives a little love back to ide, and is good considering the issues with the sata cables connection fragility but intel has a hard on to get rid of ide....

 

[termac50]

I have 3 hard drives, one Sata2, one Sata, one IDE. The two sata drives give about the same performance, and they're both noticably faster than the ide drive.

 

[ch33zw1z]

I replaced a 120GB WD 8MB cache IDE drive w/ a SATA version of the drive manufactured about 1.5 years apart. I judge my speeds based on how fast i could copy files, both big and small, to the drives. the SATA won hands down. Maybe it was the controller, maybe it was blah blah. I never ran any benchmarks or tests on them. I used real world exp, and how well they worked for me. again, way faster IMO.

 

[Bobthelost]

I've got the same drive in SATA and PATA (yes, same drive different interface), the samsung spinpoint 2504 and 2514 i think. No notable speed difference. What i do see a difference with is when i've got another program using the same HD, when it's fragmented to hell and back or when i'm trying to use the same IDE channel for two devices at the same time.

SATA vs. PATA is one of the cases where it's almost always user error that causes a difference. IF you've only got one optical and one PATA drive then don't bother "upgrading", if you need more space then obviously go for SATA.

 

[rudder]

I would recommend a PATA-SATA converter. Not for any performance reasons... but it is a lot easier to replace a drive and you won't have to worry about boot drivers if you ever ghosted to a sata for example. Plus many newer mobos only have 1 ide slot and this will keep it seperate.

 

[Philippine Mango]

Originally posted by: bob4432
you guys that are saying sata is so much faster, what drives did you replace them with? i am sure more than a couple year old ide. you need to make this a fair comparison and do both current, identical drives. you are skewing the reality of this. it would be like me comparing my new 15k.5 to my old ata133 30GB maxtor hdd and actually being surprised that the new u320 drive with perpendicular recording is faster.....

Philiippine Mango - are you running a 7200.10 series? those are some good speeds

also, op for your next drive pick up a sata because as boomerang pointed out about the lack of ide ports on the new m/bs. it does look like the new nvidia 650 series of chipsets gives a little love back to ide, and is good considering the issues with the sata cables connection fragility but intel has a hard on to get rid of ide....

2X ST3400832A (7200.8)

and ST3400632A which is funny cause seagate doesn't have that model number, however HDtach detects it as ST3400633A which makes a lot more sense. (7200.9)

Benched all three of the drives and IIRC they all had the same score. Though I will try and run a benchmark of the 7200.9 drive as I didn't empty the drive before running HDtach on two of the drives. (One of the 7200.8's were emptied completely and the score didn't improve much)

 

[Seekermeister]

Beyond the fact that HDTach shows my 16MB Maxtor as being significantly faster than my SATAs, i have also noticed that the 16MB doesn't fragment as badly as the SATA.

 

[F1shF4t]

Originally posted by: ch33zw1z
I replaced a 120GB WD 8MB cache IDE drive w/ a SATA version of the drive manufactured about 1.5 years apart. I judge my speeds based on how fast i could copy files, both big and small, to the drives. the SATA won hands down. Maybe it was the controller, maybe it was blah blah. I never ran any benchmarks or tests on them. I used real world exp, and how well they worked for me. again, way faster IMO.

Yea thats the point 1.5 years apart. Those drives most certainly use different plater densities etc.

Like i mentioned above i got 2 drives manufactured at same time both 7200.10 seagates, one sata2 (320gig) and one ide (250gig) the 250 gig is slightly faster on most read tests. In usage i cant tell a difference except for one drive has more space