Any Advantage to SATA Hard Drives?

[VideoTechMan]

Finally made my 100th post..lol, gonna have to work on getting an avatar for myself. I wanted to find out how good are the SATA hard drives are. Is the speed pretty decent? For video capturing without dropping frames, I felt it would be a nice extra storage drive in addition to my two existing hard drives. Since the MB i have supports 2 SATA drives, may as well take the opportunity. I cant really afford SCSI, and they are too much a pain to configure. Any thoughts?

VTM

[mrtristan]

The last time I read reviews on SATA drives, there wasn't a big speed difference. The main advantage is that they're supposedly the next generation of hard drives and there's room for improvement.

[sterno]

Most SATA drives are using the same physical mechanism as the UDMA version and UDMA interfaces are faster than the physical drive already. With the exception of Seagate drives and maybe the high-end WD Raptor, current SATA drives are actually still using UDMA controllers with SATA adapters and not native SATA interfaces. You probably won't see improved performance, but you'll have a better upgrade path and the cabling should be easier to manage. The next time I build a machine I'll probably go with SATA regardless of performance, dealing with recent UDMA drives has been an absolute nightmare.

[rallynavvie]

Another nice thing about them is their cables are quite a lot easier to manage. No more giant IDE ribbons flowing all over the case. However I think it's pretty damn stupid to have a different power connector as well. Everything else uses plain old Molex connectors, why should SATA be any different? Was there a reason they had to change the power connector?

[mrtristan]

SATA drives have a different power interface? I didn't know that. What does the connector look like?

Another nice thing about them is their cables are quite a lot easier to manage. No more giant IDE ribbons flowing all over the case. However I think it's pretty damn stupid to have a different power connector as well. Everything else uses plain old Molex connectors, why should SATA be any different? Was there a reason they had to change the power connector?

[freestyler]

converters are readily available too

[Hardcoreruss]

SATA drives have a different power interface? I didn't know that. What does the connector look like?

Another nice thing about them is their cables are quite a lot easier to manage. No more giant IDE ribbons flowing all over the case. However I think it's pretty damn stupid to have a different power connector as well. Everything else uses plain old Molex connectors, why should SATA be any different? Was there a reason they had to change the power connector?

Same as the sata connector but about twice as long

[sterno]

A lot of current SATA drives still have the 4-pin molex power connector, but the "standard" SATA power connector is a 15-pin connector right next to the data connector. In theory you could run power and data through a cable with one big plug instead of two, which would further simplify cabling. I think that the only things that use that now are a few SATA cables that have a Molex power adapter built in to the drive end of the cable.

[rallynavvie]

I just don't understand why they had to create a whole new power connector for it when almost everything uses Molex connectors for power. Having to use an adapter is a silly thing to do if the point of the SATA interface was to clean up some of the clutter in your case. It's just one of those things I guess I'll never understand

[sterno]

I think part of the idea of the new power connector is that someday you may be able to just plug your power supply and drive in to your motherboard and it would pass the power and data through a single cable just like USB, Firewire, etc. If that eventually happens then the new connector will reduce cable clutter.

Right now it's silly, but if the PC hardware industry can manage to pull its collective head out of its ass for once and get this done correctly then it'll be a step in the right direction. As opposed to the new CPUs and video cards that need dedicated power connectors....

[J3M]

I recently built a new PC and went with a WD 160gb SATA drive. I did spend a little extra and got the 8mb buffer, but the drive is very quiet and runs like a champ. I captured 7 hours worth of TV yesterday and only had 8 total dropped frames. I know that low number also has to do with capture card, ram, cpu, etc., but if the drive was a weak link it would show.

In short, it's a very nice drive. Also, my drive came with both the Molex power connector and the SATA power connector, so you could use either (I'm using the Molex).

[mrtristan]

So if one was to use the SATA power interface, where would it connect to? I've never seen a power supply with something other than a molex connector.