SATA HD

[isogonic]

iam putting togeather a new computer. the mobo supports SATA. i had planned to put two IDE drives from another computer in the new one. if i go with SATA, i would have two purchase two drives. Is there any great advantage to SATA vs IDE

[ROF]

* faster access

* better case airflow

* less power consumption(cooler operation)

The biggest advantage is that you are not putting some old drive into a new system and then wondering either what is making all that noise or why your system is sluggish.

[Bjs]

Sata = speed increase ... but not that noticable under normal use .

You can install a pci ide control card , and use the older ide's for storage .

You can even get sata 2 ide converter's for the time being ... save's you having to upgrade drive's and buying pci ide control card ... it's unusual , but work's fine ... till you can afford the crossover to sata drive's .

I noticed rof jumped me :

Rof "* faster access"

Reply = Wrong ... it's actually "seek time" is increased .

Rof "* better case airflow"

Reply = Really ... it depend's on case design .

Rof "* less power consumption(cooler operation)"

Reply = True , less power ... run cooler "not" .

Rof "The biggest advantage is that you are not putting some old drive into a new system and then wondering either what is making all that noise or why your system is sluggish."

Reply :

I agree totally that one should not use older drive's in new system's as it "may" degrade system perfomance ... noise's come from other factor's , not just older drive's ... system sluggishness can be caused by other issue's .

The very fact that sata have a faster seek time dose not mean a significant increase in performance ... and to most average user's , the end dose not justify the purchase ... only if the motherboard has no ide connector's ... you are given little choice on this matter .

Sata speed that I know of ... 7200 ... as you may already have ide's capable of 7200 ... only sata have increase seek time , and as I said before ... the average user will not beable to tell the difference ...

Your only issue is ... optical drive ... you'd be up for a few buck's here for sata unit's .

[waheed]

Other advantages for SATA over IDE not mentioned above are:

No jumper configuration - does away with master/slave settings

Sata is plug and play too.

For better air case flow, ROF meant that since SATA uses smaller thinner cables as opposed to bulky bigger cables for IDE, thus allowing more room for air circulation, hence better airflow, especially when you are using multiple hard drives.

Also, the more power a hard drives consumes, the hoter it gets. Its true that sata do typically run cooler than IDE drives, at least in my experience since I have a temp monitor with my case. Ive had both IDE and SATA drives, found SATA to run cooler.

[oldandinthe way]

SATA is a fundamentally slower technology than IDE. The serial connection to the drive does not run fast enough to equal the parallel connection on an IDE drive.

Other factors will govern the performance you see. SATA drives typically use cache to help overcome the bus speed disadvantage (just like CPUs do). The effectiveness of caching is dependant on what you are reading, how much you are reading, and where it is located on the disk. It is very important that you frequently defragment SATA drives.

Needless to say differences in rotational speed and other specs will have an effect, but the effectiveness of caching will be the overwhelming factor in performance.

As for better airflow, a properly designed system has adequate airflow for IDE cables. When you build your own system, you do not necessarily know where hot spots will be and whether your cooling is adequate for all of them. Smaller cables might help.

[ROF]

As for better airflow, a properly designed system has adequate airflow for IDE cables. When you build your own system, you do not necessarily know where hot spots will be and whether your cooling is adequate for all of them. Smaller cables might help.

Even a sloppily designed system with an equal number of intake/exhaust can not match the superior airflow of design of SATA Cabling Vs. IDE no matter if you use round or ribbon cables. SATA cabling is top notch in this respect.

[oldandinthe way]

Fewer wires in a cable is always superior, and usually slower. So what. If you want a thinner cable, suffer the consequences. But you are unlikely to have a choice.

Disk drive designers have wanted to put a serial bus on drives for 30 years. The motivation was cost. Fewer drivers and receivers cost less than more drivers and receivers. And control signals can be imbeded in the data stream. Other cost reductions with less potential performance impact were available and adopted. Interface design was optimized for performance.

The heat argument is obvious. Since you can't run your signals significantly faster, fewer wires will generate less heat.


Drive makers are constantly making cost/performance/reliability tradeoffs. And this would not be the first time cost has won. The older drives with multiple platters and heads had the potential for higher performance than the later designs. But improvements in rotational speed and recording density improved drive performance, and reduced cost and these features were left behind.

In recent years new drive introductions have focused on increased capacity (a firmware function) and interface changes to support greater access while maintaing the high performance of a parallel bus.

SATA is totally motivated by cost reduction. As implemented it minimizes but does not eliminate the performance loss. Reduced heat and elegance of cabling are by-products of the cost based decision.

I run an SATA drive in my system and find that I have to defrag my drive at a much greater frequency to maintain performance. I expect that the latest group of higher capacity SATA drives will continue to have that requirement and it may be even more pressing as the size of the cache becomes a smaller pecentage of the drive capacity, and dual core systems become more prevalent.

Although I am sure that some users experience heat related system failures, in my opinion, today's systems are both hotter and MORE reliable than previous generations of PC. This is because systems have better heat and energy management. Every component manufacturer is looking for bigger/faster/cooler/cheaper but it is the system builder who is responsible for the PC not the componet manufacturer.

[CrayonEater]

The downside of SATA, from my observance is that they are less resilient to rough operating conditions than conventional IDEs. I deal sometimes with industrial environments and all else being equal the SATAs always fail long before the IDE/ATAs.

That said, it also depends on whether you are looking at SATA-II (3.0) versus SATA-I. Older SATA-I is comparable with regular ATA/100 or ATA/133 in terms of speed. SATA-II is the next generation and is faster. Plus, many SATAs (mostly SATA-II, but a few SATA-I) support NCQ, so if your controller supports it, you WILL get a nice performance boost. Also, SATA's usually work with on-board RAID; that's not always true with ATA/IDE drives, which often need a separate controller to do RAID.

[isogonic]

looks like two schools of thought. i found varying opinion elsewhere also, decisions, decisions.

[budz]

How about buying USB/FIREWIRE external hard drive enclosures for your IDE hard drives then you can use them on your new computer. In a way you'll be making good use out of those drives. In my opinion the SATA hard drives are good to use because they use smaller and thinner cables. It does provide better cable management and helps keep better airflow in the case.

I have 1 SATA Western Digital Raptor 36gb hard drive that has my OS on there which is used on my P4 3.00 pc which runs fine. Just remember that if you're going to use a SATA hard drive as your boot drive you'll have to install the SATA drivers when you're installing Windows.

[Abbadon]

Hello,

Keep in mind that you are going to need an IDE hard disk anyway if you decide to go with SATA, because you cannot boot Windows from a SATA disk without an IDE disk in the machine.

[budz]

Hello,

Keep in mind that you are going to need an IDE hard disk anyway if you decide to go with SATA, because you cannot boot Windows from a SATA disk without an IDE disk in the machine.

That's not true. My Western Digital Raptor 36gb hard drive is SATA which boots to windows perfectly fine without any IDE hard drive in that computer. I only have SATA hard drives running in my P4 3.00 pc.

isogonic if you decide on getting a SATA hard drive WINDOWS will ask you if you have any 3rd party drivers to install then you have to press F6 then install the drivers from a floppy. To get the SATA drivers it needs to be extracted from the motherboard cd then copied to a floppy disc.

[CrayonEater]

I have no IDE HDDs in my main rig and I boot it to Windoze every day. I have never heard anybody say that before. Perhaps you are thinking of something else...?

I also ran SATA just fine w/o the RAID drivers before I RAIDed; though they probably don't hurt to put in if you're doing a fresh installation.

[DarrellS]

Sata is plug and play too.

Yeah, that's what I thought after my brother installed two SATAs on his ASUS board but after I returned two SATA IIs, bought a SATA I and installed drivers and updated my BIOS and nearly ruined my motherboard, I found out that I needed to go into BIOS and make all kinds of changes to get the SATA drive to work on an MSI board. Nowhere on anyone's website or installation instructions did it tell me any of this until I had already done the BIOS update. Luckily I was able to flash the MB without ruining the board. So much for plug and play.

Get two IDE drives and as many SATA drives as your board will hold.

Hell, my friend bought an IDE controller card so he could have 3 optical drives, 3 IDE drives and two SATAs.

You'll probably need to get a bigger power supply though. We all did.

[Abbadon]

Hello,

Keep in mind that you are going to need an IDE hard disk anyway if you decide to go with SATA, because you cannot boot Windows from a SATA disk without an IDE disk in the machine.

That's not true. My Western Digital Raptor 36gb hard drive is SATA which boots to windows perfectly fine without any IDE hard drive in that computer. I only have SATA hard drives running in my P4 3.00 pc.

isogonic if you decide on getting a SATA hard drive WINDOWS will ask you if you have any 3rd party drivers to install then you have to press F6 then install the drivers from a floppy. To get the SATA drivers it needs to be extracted from the motherboard cd then copied to a floppy disc.

I have an ASUS motherboard with SATA support, I installed one SATA HDD and tried to install windows using that configuration, and windows ask me for an IDE disk to write some data to it.

Maybe my motherboard just does not allow one single SATA for booting an OS, there is the option of Bootrom chip enabled when in RAID mode.

[freedumb_youth]

Hello,

Keep in mind that you are going to need an IDE hard disk anyway if you decide to go with SATA, because you cannot boot Windows from a SATA disk without an IDE disk in the machine.

Is this true? Ive never heard of this before I thought SATAII as a system drive would be fine whether it be 80 gig or 320.

[Abbadon]

Hello,

Keep in mind that you are going to need an IDE hard disk anyway if you decide to go with SATA, because you cannot boot Windows from a SATA disk without an IDE disk in the machine.

Is this true? Ive never heard of this before I thought SATAII as a system drive would be fine whether it be 80 gig or 320.

To be frank with you, I am not sure now, I had problems installing Windows XP to my new system consisting of just one SATA HDD, the only way to boot Windows was installing an IDE HDD. After that, the installation went alright and I was able to boot Windows using the SATA disk.

According to my motherboard documentation, if I configure two SATAs as RAID, I need to enable the Bootrom chip. Maybe this could make a difference.

P.S.
My motherboard is the ASUS K8V SE Deluxe and in reference to storage is advertised:

Dual SATA RAID
The Promise 20378 RAID controller incorporated two Serial ATA and one parallel connectors with RAID 0, RAID 1 and RAID 0+1 functions while the VT8237 RAID controller provides another two Serial ATA connectors for RAID 0 and RAID 1 functions. The K8V SE Deluxe is the ideal solution to enhance hard disk performance and data backup protection without the cost of add-on cards.

[oldandinthe way]

I have XP Home SP2 with only an SATA hard disk in the box - works. Gateway ships thousands of SATA only machines each month.

If you folks who are rolling your own have problems with SATA, it would be ironic since the lower heat and simpler cabling would be most likely to benefit you.

CrayonEater
I am curious about your experience. Mechanically I know of no reson why you should see a higher failure rate, there's not a heap of difference in the designs of similar age drives.

Perhaps your experience is comparing drives of differing generations or manufacturers. I would not expect much difference between comparable serial and parallel drives.

Abbadon
Your Raid equipped motherboard will certainly get arround many of the SATA performance limitations. Might be the best solution to using SATa drives.

[lenti_75]

OLDER mobos needed to install windows as SCSI, you have to press F6 and install as scsi,
so you needed the drive for it, but not anymore.
these days mobos, have included sata as IDE, you'll see the sata drive as ide drive, so windows doesn't need the drive anymore.


overall sata is better, even more with sataII.

[CrayonEater]

As to the IDE needed for bootup - if you've been having that problem, check your BIOS. Last time I checked you had to enable the RAID controller. Asus is particularly bad when it comes to undocumented settings.

My system (A Soyo Dragon II w/ SATA-I) was set up so that SATA was the first channel and IDE is the second. No problems, my SATA drives would boot and run like they were Raptors, while the opticals on my IDE cable ran beautfully too. It was in the "Chipset" or "
"On-board IDE" setup menu. I think Asus has the configuration settings in a RAID menu but if not try these.

The point is, you should not need an IDE instead of SATA for boot on any motherboard, and if you do, it is because there is something wrong with your BIOS.


oldandinthe way -

Yeah, I thought that too but it seems to happen regardless of generation. Seems odd since the first SATA were only lightly-modded IDEs anyway! But two recent failures reported under fairly light g-loads were a Maxtor DiamondMax-9 bought 9/04. and a Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 bought in March of this year. I think that's two generations of SATA as the DiamondMax 10 is comparable to the newer Barracudas. Weird, huh? Oh, well, I'm certainly not going to stop using SATA over this.

[INFRATOM]

In theory SATA is better, but that is the case if all the design is SATA. Many just created SATA interface and put it on IDE device like some sort of converter. Until then , use whatever you have. if you have to buy new ones don't buy IDE unless you get a good deal and prospect of putting it on new mother board is not much. Quality if HD makes the main difference, how much cache it has ,speed, seek time etc. IDE cable is a drag!

[Jim44]

P.S.
My motherboard is the ASUS K8V SE Deluxe and in reference to storage is advertised:

I have exactly that same MB, and the only issue I ran into in building the system was that the MB (or BIOS, not sure which) wouldn't support a SATA optical drive as a boot device. Once I swapped in an IDE optical drive, no problems loading XP SP2 onto the WD SATA HDD (only had the 1 HDD to begin with).

I do not use the RAID functionality, BTW. Each of the 2 HDDs are separate (one for OS & data, other for video processing only).

Cheers,
Jim

[chesterfield]

PUT OR MAKE A FLOPPY AND HIT F6 AND YOU WILL ALL HAVE NO PROBLEMS......

[SingSing]

Fewer wires in a cable is always superior, and usually slower.

SATA uses QPSK encoding similar to telephone modem. The symbol rate is much higher than the simple on/off over the wires.So more bits are transfered thru just a few wires.