A8N-E & ATA vs SATA II speed question

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James

I just upgraded my ATA100 (WD 80GB) hard drive to a SATA II (Samsung
160GB). I have heard people say that Windows XP "boots real fast" after
they upgraded to the SATA II drives. But I didn't notice any significant
difference. After my machine is booted, my applications appear to load
just a tad quicker, but in my opinion it was not worth it to upgrade drives.

(BTW, I used Norton Ghost 9 to copy the old image to the new SATA drive)

So is my (no significant increase in speed) pretty typical, or have I
neglected something in the upgrade process? Or, do I need to buy another
drive and use RAID 0 to notice any significant speed differences?

Thanks,

James
 
James said:
I just upgraded my ATA100 (WD 80GB) hard drive to a SATA II (Samsung
160GB). I have heard people say that Windows XP "boots real fast" after
they upgraded to the SATA II drives. But I didn't notice any significant
difference. After my machine is booted, my applications appear to load
just a tad quicker, but in my opinion it was not worth it to upgrade
drives.

(BTW, I used Norton Ghost 9 to copy the old image to the new SATA drive)

So is my (no significant increase in speed) pretty typical, or have I
neglected something in the upgrade process? Or, do I need to buy another
drive and use RAID 0 to notice any significant speed differences?
Click to expand...
Machines with XP, can boot quite quickly with a modern drive, especially
on a 'clean' install (copying, will have brought quite a lot of 'dross'
with it). However the speed gains from reasonably recent drives, are not
large. Remember that the interface 'speed', is like a speed limit, and
unlike on most modern roads, where cars can more or less all reach the
specified limit, for hard drives, the data rate from the platters of even
the fastest available drives will not exceed even ATA100 rates. You only
gain from the faster interface speed, when the data is already waiting in
the cache, or when you are writing the first small piece of data that can
fit into the cache. After this, the limit is the media data rate, and this
has only increased by a few percent per annum over the last few years. If
your ATA100 drive, was the WD caviar, this had one of the fastest raw
platter data rates of a drive from a couple of years ago, and a seek
time/latency time, that matches the best current IDE units. The gains then
would be small, and probably only visible when moving larger amounts of
data. SATA150 drives are not 1.5* as fast as a ATA100 drive. In most
cases, the 'gain' is probably only perhaps 10 to 15% (if that...).

Best Wishes
 
James said:
I just upgraded my ATA100 (WD 80GB) hard drive to a SATA II (Samsung
160GB). I have heard people say that Windows XP "boots real fast" after
they upgraded to the SATA II drives. But I didn't notice any significant
difference. After my machine is booted, my applications appear to load
just a tad quicker, but in my opinion it was not worth it to upgrade drives.

(BTW, I used Norton Ghost 9 to copy the old image to the new SATA drive)

So is my (no significant increase in speed) pretty typical, or have I
neglected something in the upgrade process? Or, do I need to buy another
drive and use RAID 0 to notice any significant speed differences?

Thanks,

James
Click to expand...

As the other poster noted, perhaps restoring you old data to the SATA drive
affected its performance, but I just upgraded my system, which included a
Hitachi SATA II and did a clean install as well. What was notable was when I
installed Office XP (don't care for 2003, except for Outlook); during
installation, I checked the various options to install for each app (Word,
Excel, Access, & Outlook). I clicked the button to proceed with the install,
turned back to something else I was doing in the room (and I'm not
exaggerating here) and when turned back to the computer, the install was
done! I'm talking a couple of minutes tops here, so something was a helluva
lot faster. I suspect the combo of a fresh XP install and the SATA drive,
but whatever, it was clearly notable.
I'll be interested to see, as time wears on, if this performance degrades
much.
 
Thanks guys. I believe the fresh install would probably be the ticket to
faster booting. Just FYI, I did try using Diskeeper 10 Premier Pro to defrag
& optimize the new SATA drive, but this didn't change anything.

James
 
Thanks guys. I believe the fresh install would probably be the ticket to
faster booting. Just FYI, I did try using Diskeeper 10 Premier Pro to defrag
& optimize the new SATA drive, but this didn't change anything.

James
 
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