The difference between SATA & IDE ?

eirman

I did a search on "SATA" in this forum and read a good few threads before posting this. I couldn't find all the the information I needed so here goes ....

Why are SATA HDs more expensive ?

What is the maximum number of hard drives one can get into PC where the motherboard has IDE & SATA interfaces ?

kinkstr

Serial ATA has a faster data transfer speed than IDE, sorry its to late for me to give any more coherent info than that

jetsonx

What are ATA drives then?

kinkstr

jetsonx wrote:

What are ATA drives then?

What

youcancallmeal

I dont know much about them either but i do know they have different connecting cables.

eggshapedfred

say you were setting up some kind of recording studio, which would be the best drives to use SATA, IDE, or SCSI (forgetting about capacity (and cost) for the moment).

snappieT

I would be inclined to use IDE drives, but put them onto a raid controller, so if one sh1ts itself, the other one has an exact clone.

snappieT

What is the maximum number of hard drives one can get into PC where the motherboard has IDE & SATA interfaces ?

IDE has normally 2 channels, and on each are master and slave. Those channels will also have to accomodate your CD, DVD etc.
You can get controllers that slot into a PCI slot that will take 4 more drives, ergo, on a standard PC (6 PCI) you could have 28 drives total (inc. CD and DVD). Thats 6 terrabytes on 250GB disks. I think that should cope... :-)

skywalker

eggshapedfred wrote:

say you were setting up some kind of recording studio, which would be the best drives to use SATA, IDE, or SCSI (forgetting about capacity (and cost) for the moment).

forgetting capacity and cost i presume you want the best performance, in which case SCSI is the answer.

to OP. basically SATA gives better data transfer rates and its cabling is neater. Also each drive has its own cable so no messing around with jumpers.


as for maximum number of hdds. i suppose the lowest common denominator answer would be 6. 2 on the SATA and 4 on the IDE. however you probly want optical (DVD-rw etc) drives in there too. also you can buy PCI cards to extend the number of hdds you can put inside a computer.

Zascar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sata

Winters

SATA > IDE.

That pretty much covers it. You get 150mbts speed with SATA1, compared to 100 or 133 with normal IDE [which also have to share cables]. Motherboards bought in the last year or so will usually have at least 2 SATA ports on them.

snapscan1212p, SATA drives can easily be put into a RIAD setup and you can easily buy a SATA Controller card and have a silly amount of SATA drives. [I read a review with 30 SATA drives running off 5 controller cards each with 4 sata ports on them a while ago ].

If your looking at upgrading. SATA is obviously the way to go.

ressem

You have parallel ata (old style, wide ribbon cable & connector, molex power connector, 133 MB theoretical max, 18 inch max cable length )
and
serial ATA
(new style, thin wire and connector, new power connector type, 150 (and 300 + ncq for sata2) theoretical data rates, 40 inch max cable)

Early sata products use a parallel drive with a parallel to sata bridge, + they are newer, there used to be a larger price premium.
---
No of drives? Limited to your case and power supply.
You can add controller cards to add drives to a system. for 12 drives per card
http://www.3ware.com/products/parallel_ata.asp
http://www.3ware.com/products/serial_ata8000.asp
with sata in theory you could have 48 drives, though you would need a very special server to go over 24 (chenbro 519).

It's possible to use sata drives as external devices, comparable in performance to firewire 800. Though you should use a sata card with dedicated durable external connectors for this purpose.

Using just your MB without buying hardware, and removing DVD drives, you will get 2 drives per PATA port and 1 per SATA. But you'll have to add lots of connectors to your power supply

---
As for a recording studio, depends what you need and whether you intend to buy a new system for this purpose.
For top performance and reliability you'd like a
SCSI raid card
on a PCIX (or PCI Express but there are few of these around yet)
with a raid 5 array of 10,000 or 15,000 rpm drives.
expect to pay through the nose, also they can be noisy

For performance and capacity I'd go for
SATA raid card as it's more convenient to add large numbers of drives using sata,
again a PCIX or PCI express interface, as old PCI gets swamped rapidly.
Raid 5 array of either 74Gb Western Digital Raptor Enterprise (10Krpm,8MB) - SATA, (top performance) or 300Gb Maxtor MaxLine III (Industria/Heavy Duty/Reliability 24x7) (7200rpm,16MB) SATA NCQ (High capacity)

as raid 0 for work purposes makes you sleep badly

eirman

Many thanks for all the erudite replies