Upgrading - Should I switch to SATA ?

eirman

I'm upgrading a PC. The new motherboard supports SATA. What is the performance gain in ditching my 4 year old 80gig IDE drive as the main drive and using a new SATA drive ?

Creamy Goodness

in theory they are meant to run at something like 150MB/sec i'm not sure on the tech side of it but in reality they don't run near their maximum.

there's not much of a performance gain per se, unless you go for WD raptors which have faster hard drive spin think it's 10,000 RPM as opposed to 5,400/7,200 RPM of IDE drives.

the advantage i see in SATA drives are that the interfaces (power connecters and the SATA cables) are much much handier to remove and connect.

SeanW

But SATA architectures are not supported by any version of Windows by default (though mobo drivers can be added both at install time and from within Windows) - and if you decide to reinstall a fresh copy of Windows on a new SATA drive, such an installation will be considerably more complicated than an install to an IDE drive.

What you might do: buy the SATA drive now and use it as extra storage. Then do some research about installing Windows on a SATA drive or disk cloning type softwares. Then, at some point either reinstall Windows or (if possible) ghost it onto the SATA drive.

Another thing to make sure is which type of SATA your board supports vs. what the new HD supports, if your mobo only does SATA while the HD is SATA2, it'll have to switched back, there's usually a jumper for that.

eirman

Thanks for the useful replies - I'll stick with IDE for the moment

irlrobins

Installing windows on SATA is piss easy. SeanW makes it sound impossible!

TimTim

irlrobins wrote:

Installing windows on SATA is piss easy. SeanW makes it sound impossible!

It never seemed to work for me when I tried. So I've just stuck using my IDE drive for windows installs and SATA for all the rest.

Ponster

Installing Windows on SATA just means having to press F6 and load some drivers gtom a floppy or cd-rom. It adds about an extra 60 seconds to the installation.

Sata is hot-swappable and most motherboards that support SATA also have built in RAID support which can be useful.

Blazer

plus there's a faster transfer rate..
try installing xp on both ide/sata drives and you'll see a fast installation on sata..plus no more screwing around with bent pins..

astrofool

SeanW's problems with SATA are down to his motherboard, as it sees the SATA connection as an add in controller rather than IDE device.

ANY new Intel/ATI/nVidia/Via board will natively support SATA without having to use drivers. Drivers will still be (and always have been) needed if you are setting up a RAID system, whether PATA or SATA (apart from very old boards that happen to have had drivers included in Windows XP, eg. the HPT372 chip). At most a user might have to go into the BIOS and change a controller from RAID to standard, though they usually ship as a standard drive by default.

Also jumpers to "switch back" don't have to be used generally.

BlackWizard

Ive a raptor. Windows has installed without any problems or having to load
drivers of any sort. Done about 5 re-installations on it. But something happened
my boot sector I think :? so now It says please insert system disk when I try
to boot into windows. So I have to boot with my windows CD but I think thats
my fault for f'ing up an installation and not SATA.

zilog_jones

Ponster wrote:

Installing Windows on SATA just means having to press F6 and load some drivers gtom a floppy or cd-rom. It adds about an extra 60 seconds to the installation.

You could also make a new copy of your Windows CD - there's a standard directory structure for putting in OEM drivers onto the CD so Windows can find them... actually I'm not sure if that works with RAID drivers now

jor el

I have an Nforce 4 chipset on my mobo and XP SP2 installed without any problems to an SATA2 disk. The speed difference in expanding the directory structure in explorer is noticable, when compared to the old IDE drive.

You should definitely go for a new SATA2 disk, they're very cheap too for 320G or so. Keep the old drive as a backup maybe, or for music and stuff.

SeanW

astrofool wrote:

SeanW's problems with SATA are down to his motherboard, as it sees the SATA connection as an add in controller rather than IDE device.

No, my problems were down to me putting the wrong drivers on the floppy one of those newbie mistakes someone not familiar with SATA can make.

I actually reccommended the OP to buy a SATA drive, just to be aware that it might be a little more complicated.

Nothing wrong with using a new HD for storage for a while then putting windows on later.

astrofool

But you still had to use a floppy! Most other boards don't need drivers from floppy drive any more.

CombatCow

What's a floppy? :O ....seriously tho, go with sata it dosent make sense to keep investing in old tech


CC

TempestSabre

eirman wrote:

....What is the performance gain in ditching my 4 year old 80gig IDE...

Its 4 years newer. New SATA and IDE drives which are otherwise identical, are pretty close in performance for normal desktop use. However a 4 yr old vs a new one. The new one is likely to be considerably faster. Do a comparision of the spec like access times and rotation speed between your old drive and a new one. With drives so cheap it makes no sense to use the old one, unless you have a very tight budget.

Once you start fiddling with old hardware it has a tendency to stop working. So make sure you have a solid backup of your data (at least two copies on different media, and test that it all works) before you do the upgrade. perhaps that that is overkill for your data. Thats for you to decide how important it is, if the PC broke or was robbed.