Question on ATA vs. SATA

jabaroon

Hey All,

Am thinking of upgrading to a 64bit AMD. All of the Mobo's now seem to have a SATA controller as the primary on the board. Some have a secondary controller that does STAT/ATA133 etc...

Couple of questions....

- I have several IDE ATA-133 drives (large ones!)...that i dont want to discard in the upgrade. Do these have to be put on the secondary controller? Is there any options for putting them on the primary?

- If the answer to the above is that I need to put them on the secondary controller, then what do I do with my optical drives!!...these are all IDE ATA-xxx also. I have 3 optical drives and 4 hard drives!

- Finally, anyone got any recomendations on which of the 64bit AMD compatible boards are rockin! ABIT, ASUS, etc...? Anyone got one and had a good / bad experience?


Ta,
Jab

hazbot

Can't speak for other motherboards you may be looking at, but on mine (Asus A7N8X) the SATA controller is in addition to the onboard ATA controllers.

i.e. you have SATA drive(s) hooked up but still have both primary and secondary ATA controllers free to do with as you wish

jabaroon

Hazbot, thanks for that...
I assume its just 2 devices per channel?...(eg: max 4 devices on PATA and no option to RAID them).

Anyone else know of other boards. Im particularly interested in anything that will accomodate my 4 PATA drives and my 3 opticals (Im currently on RAID 1 with 3 of the 4 hard disks)

Also, anyone tried the PATA->SATA convertors?
(http://www.cpustuff.com/cpu/customer/product.php?productid=70&cat=6&page=1)

Ta,
Jab

hazbot

Originally posted by jabaroon
Hazbot, thanks for that...
I assume its just 2 devices per channel?...(eg: max 4 devices on PATA and no option to RAID them).

On my board, this is true. Totally standard stuff on the PATA side.

You can RAID the SATA drives though (maximum of two drives). I have done this and it works very well.

You could potentially hook up two of your PATA drives using converters.

netman

You can have two drives per channel on the PATA side, and one drive per connector on the SATA side.

There's plenty of converters that make a PATA drive fit a SATA connector.
I have an ABIT board that shipped with the converter - they call it Serillel.
(it's an Intel board, but they'll probably package it with an AMD board too)

To be honest, most SATA drives are actually PATA drives with the Silicon Image PATA-SATA bridge, the very same chip that's inside the ABIT Serillel adapter.

With the new nforce 250 motherboards you can combine PATA and SATA channels in a RAID array.

You won't have any problems using your old drives

jabaroon

Hey Netman,

Thanks for the info, that really helped. Think I will keep my eye out for the nForce 250. Doesn't seem to be available on Komplett yet, but hopefully it will be soon!

Just out of curiosity, do you know how many S-ATA drive that you can chain together?...I assume there is a limit?

Also, does anyone know anywhere that sells the PATA-SATA convertors?...searching on google isn't really bringing back any results and they seem very scarse on eBay!

Ta,
Jab

SouperComputer

id wait until you get your mobo. A good few boards are coming with converters these days.

AKAIK, SATA is a bit lighter on resources. Gotta love those thin cables though.

jabaroon

Thanks Souper!....however, Im guessing that they will only come with a single convertor or two at best....unfortunatley, I need 4!!!!!!

Jab

netman

I don't think you'll need any at all. Most motherboards come with 2 PATA connectors, so you can hook up 4 drives, same as you're probably doing now.

You can't chain SATA drives, so one drive per one connector.

If you want to use more drives than you have connectors then you'll have to get an additional SATA controller. I think there's controllers out there with 8 SATA connectors, so 6 PCI slots x 8 SATA drives + 2 drives onboard = 50 possible SATA drives on one PC. Don't think you'll need that much

My board (ABIT IC7-G) has 4 SATA channels and 2 PATA. The 2 PATA and 2 SATA are provided by the chipset, and the other 2 SATA by an additional controller.

Moving drives to the SATA channel won't really get you any benefit in performance.
It's more of a matter of convenience than anything else.