Should I get SATA hdd now or wait?

[CP]

I would like to upgrade my hdd and am wondering should I get SATA hdd or stay away? If should go for SATA, which brand would you recommend that cost under $100 with reliable performance.

Thanks

 

[PCTweaker5]

Get a used raptor here or for like $113 or something you can get a new one at newegg. I hear they are really great hard drives and cant wait til I get me a couple of 74Gb'ers.

 

[fredtam]

Originally posted by: CP
I would like to upgrade my hdd and am wondering should I get SATA hdd or stay away? If should go for SATA, which brand would you recommend that cost under $100 with reliable performance.

Thanks

If you have a mobo with SATA there is no reason not to. You won't get a significant performance boost (unless you get a raptor) but they are just as reliable. Get a Maxtor, WD, or Seagate 80-120Gb or spend an extra $16 dollars for a true upgrade and get a 36Gb raptor. They are all good drives.

 

[Axon]

What I love about my SATA set-up is that I do not lose an IDE port when installing the inevitable new hard drive.

If I recall, I bought my 200 gig sata from Newegg for 176 as opposed to ATA for 162? Worth the 14 bucks IMO.

 

[thorin]

Raptor kicks the butts of all drives listed at StorageReview.com with the exception of the top 2 Ultra320 SCSI drives, it even kicks the Seagate Cheetah 15.3 Ultra320 series.

Here's their full review of the Raptors.

Thorin

 

[CP]

Good recommendation, but I am wondering why Raptor 36GB is not even close to Raptor 74GB in term of performance?

 

[tallman45]

http://tech-report.com/reviews/2004q1/raptor-wd740gd/index.x?pg=1

The new Raptor's internals have also been tweaked to give the drive faster seek times and transfer rates, lower noise levels, and support for command queuing.

 

[suklee]

Originally posted by: CP
I would like to upgrade my hdd and am wondering should I get SATA hdd or stay away? If should go for SATA, which brand would you recommend that cost under $100 with reliable performance.

Thanks

You don't mention what hdd you are upgrading from.

personally, as it is today, I won't consider it an upgrade from ATA to SATA unless

1) you're increasing storage space
2) you're getting the Raptor

SATA2 should be out later this year with native command queueing which should help if the machine's primary role is a network server. On desktops this benefit wont' be as pronounced, but it'll be an improvement over SATA1 nonetheless.

So, which hdd are you upgrading from?

 

[Davegod]

might depend on your mobo aswell, nforce2 boards for example do not have SATA on the southbridge and SATA harddisks might use up a lot of the PCI bus. Really dont know if this would be any sort of problem though (what do you guys think?).

else, SATA seems better than PATA. Not really for performance, excepting the Raptor and Seagate drives (which are native SATA and actually get some benefits from it). But the cable seems a minor benefit for airflow, plus it will be on it's own channel (may/may not be an issue for your drive setup), and lastly it's more certain you will be able to carry over the drive to your next PC, or two.

 

[CP]

I upgraded from my 4 years old WD 30GB 7200RPM 2MB ATA-100 hdd. I am using Shuttle SB65G2 with SATA support. I am thinking about the 36GB Raptor, but the price drags me back a little bit...

 

[nitromullet]

Yeah, the size of a 36GB Raptor is small for the price, but it was meant to be an enterprise drive. If price is a serious limiting factor, get something else.

 

[AIWGuru]

There are actually not a lot of HDDs which natively support SATA. most use a bridge. Make sure you get a native one. Why? I honestly don't know. It just seems like a good idea