SATA v ATA-100

Ardent

Hi

I bought a Seagate Barracuda from Komplett (http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.asp?sku=123995&cks=PRL). I'm reasonably happy with it, althougb it takes a while to back up DVDs and load Doom III levels (I have a p4 2.8 Ghz with 1 gig of RAM). I've noticed that I have a couple of SATA connectors on my motherboard. A few quick questions for those who know:

1) Assume the SATA drive is 7200RPM as well, would there be a significant speed advantage in a SATA capable HDD over the one I currently have?

2) Are there any problems using both a SATA drive and an ATA drive together in the same system?

2) I bought a very expensive ATA-100/133 cable from a high street dealer a while back, says on the packaging that it's built for optimal data transfer etc etc. Would using this cable with my current HDD give any performance increases over the bog standard cable that came with the motherboard?

Thanks
Ardent

bminish

Ardent wrote:

Hi

1) Assume the SATA drive is 7200RPM as well, would there be a significant speed advantage in a SATA capable HDD over the one I currently have?

Possibly, but only providing the performance bottleneck isn't somewhere else in the system

2) Are there any problems using both a SATA drive and an ATA drive together in the same system?

Shouldn't be. What's your operating system. I have both working ok under windows 2000 and linux

2) I bought a very expensive ATA-100/133 cable from a high street dealer a while back, says on the packaging that it's built for optimal data transfer etc etc. Would using this cable with my current HDD give any performance increases over the bog standard cable that came with the motherboard?

Nahh. the expensive cables are a load of codswallop. the mainboard would have come with ATA-100/133 cables. In this context a Cable either works or it doesn't

.Brendan

Ardent

Thanks for the reply Brendan. I have Windows XP.

Pity about the cable, blasted thing cost me 20 quid!

Col_Loki

The Seagates are known more for quiet operation than performance. The Hitachi and WD's are known more for performance.

The difference between SATA and PATA is only slight. If you want to see a big difference in loading times then your looking at a RAID 0 array (ie 2 x SATA hard drives the same type and size), or have a look at the WD Raptors 10k RPM.


Is your hard disk 2mb cache or 8mb cache version?

Ardent

It's the 8 mb version.

leeroybrown

Those overpriced cables have zero performance gain. I think that anything more than €4 for an IDE cable is over-priced.

As for SATA v.x ATA-100, you'll see a slight speed increase (55Mb/sec v.s 48Mb/sec) during large file transfers on S-ATA systems. Otherwise the difference is negligible and the main improvement is the neater cabling.

skywalker

would you see any major performance hit from running sata hard drives from a controller card as opposed to running em off the motherboard? like your primary hdds for OS, games, files etc. im upgrading the hdd's and cant decide whether to get a controller card or upgrade the mobo.

leeroybrown

The problem with using PCI controller is that it'll more than likely be 32bit, 33MHz PCI which means that all that ATA activity can saturate the PCI bus. A standard (32bit, 33MHz) PCI bus can theoretically sustain 132MB/sec so one drive will be fine but two running at full speed will probably be slowed down.

Basically, you'd be better off attaching your hard drives directly to your motherboard as it won't have any performance hit for the drives themselves or the other PCI peripherals.