SATA? RAID?

[gryfon19]

Can someone give me a nutshell description of what SATA and RAID are in terms of using a hard drive? Thanks.

 

[Slick5150]

SATA is just a new type of hard drive connector basically. Drives used to use IDE cables/interfaces, now use SATA cables/interfaces. There's a theoretical speed increase there as well, but really the main difference right now is the cable you use.

RAID is a system of using 2 hard drives together to either a) make 1 large hard drive out of the 2, and/or b) Have the drives mirror each other so there is constnatly backups of your data being made on both hard drives (in case one dies). There are other uses as well, but that's the gist.

 

[zest]

R.A.I.D

S.ATA

 

[gryfon19]

Is SATA only used for hard drives? Or can it be used for optical drives as well?

 

[zest]

You can have SATA opticals and hard drives.
Plexor have a SATA drive bru wheter serial oopticals have any benifits remains dougtful.

There is also a ide to serial adapter you can get which works on any ide device.

 

[zest]

This is some testing done a couple of weeks ago with Native Command Queuing (NCQ). NCQ ,IDE, RAID ,SATA & SATA2....Raptor still rules..


[L=Hot Hardware]http://hothardware.com/printarticle.aspx?articleid=745[/

Very interesting benchmarks.