Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a
PCI SATA card now. No point in crippling the new decent
performance system by having the hard drives on a PCI card.
It makes sense to buy a drive that uses the interface the
system supports.
If we are considering that NEXT system, at that point in the
future the best performance won't come from a drive bought
today either, it will come from this future drive
technology, or actually, a combination of two drives.
Further we have not established that the drive bought today
will actually need a PCI PATA card on that next system... it
was just a random speculation as a justification to buy
something the user may never need- any kind of PCI
controller card.
Unlikely to be price competitive to a PCI SATA card now
since there will be little demand for PCI Express PATA cards.
Oh? One would think there isn't a lot of demand for PCI
PATA cards since all boards had them for years, and yet they
are in the market at $15. There is no reason to believe
they won't be price conpetitive as they are not an
inherantly expensive product to make.
That does radically limit your choices tho, particularly
if you want a competitively priced motherboard.
Yes it does, but if you don't buy a board with a fair # of
slots, the functionality of the system may likewise be
radically reduced, especially for some of us here who
already have myriad PCI cards.
And I dont have many cards at all in the newer systems now,
essentially because everything comes standard except for a
gaming class video card and I dont even bother with those,
tho I do add a decent dual head video card to all systems now.
Things come standard but not necessarily with the features
or performance one will want. Many don't buy or upgrade a
system merely to get another few % performance increase on
CPU/etc but they want to raise or at least retain the other
positive system attributes they'd previously enjoyed such as
video capture, high quality (not just paper spec) sound,
eSATA ports.
Not necessarily enough of them tho. If you want two
optical drives, you're stuffed if its only got one IDE port.
.... or you just buy the PCI PATA card as already mentioned,
just not a RAID card if the particular specimen won't
support ATAPI.
Makes a lot more sense to buy a SATA drive now and a PCI SATA
card now, off ebay, from a retail operation that sells on ebay.
Why would you bother with eBay when everyone and their
brother sells low cost SATA cards? Seems like an
unnecessary risk to me, especially when the # of sellers
stocking them is SO great that the purchase can be combined
with some other parts order to reduce if not eliminate the
shipping cost (which would tend to be about 1/4 the cost of
the card).
Unlikely that he'll be happy with just one hard drive and one
optical drive. He's already got more than that in his dinosaur.
If he has these drives already, all the more reason to have
the PATA card in the new system to reuse them.
If he needs MORE drives in the next system, the obvious
choice once he HAS the new system is the SATA as it is then
natively supported.
Makes a lot more sense to cripple the dinosaur,
not the new one and not limit which motherboard
you can use in the new system.
Sure, but its a slow old dinosaur anyway, bet he wont even notice.
Actually for common tasks his system is plenty fast enough
to make the HDDs performance a bottleneck. Once you go over
a few hundred MHz CPU, HDD is the primary bottleneck for web
surfing, email, many office tasks... essentially all the
more common uses of a PC, even loading the OS.
Most people are irrelevant, what matters is what he has in his dinosaur.
His system could end up faster if properly set up than a
brand new one that was crippled to the PCI limits of the Via
chipset and a PCI controller card. That is, at most common
tasks. We could surely come up with some hypothetical use
that stressed the CPU or other subsystem more, but most
common tasks won't.
And if its not the boot drive, I bet he wont even notice that.
If it is only used for supplimental storage and there are no
large files being used, such as video editing, that is
likely true. It's still a waste of money for the SATA card
though.
Not when its not the boot drive.
Maybe. We will have to assume he's installing the drive to
actually use it somehow... so ultimately that use will
dictate whether it's significant.
It's significantly slower... and at additional cost, and
having to add the PCI card. Worst possible solution all
"just in case" he'll want to reuse the drive AND "IF" he
manages to use up all the next systems PATA positions, AND
"IF" there weren't any better PCI Express card alternatives
at this point in the future. So many "IFS" that it becomes
a shot in the dark whether there will ever be a realized
benefit, but already there are clear detractions from the
SATA card.
Sure, but its already a slow old dinosaur, that isnt
going to change with a non boot drive on a PCI card.
Actually it's not so slow for most uses, except the primary
bottleneck- the hard drive.
Its a slow old dinosaur, no news.
Bullshit, they're just mediocre performers.
.... if by mediocre you really mean "the most significant
performance limit to a modern HDD possible" then perhaps so.
Putting a SATA card or ATA133 card on the PCI bus of that
Via chipset will be slower than an ATA66 southbridge
controller in actual use. IF there were some gain in going
the SATA route we could weigh the pros and cons but there is
no actual gain, only a theory that some day in a certain
situation it "might" have the potential to be a gain. That
is such a stretch it isn't even reasonable.
