Sata or IDE opinions sought

  • Thread starter Thread starter Peter in New Zealand
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Peter in New Zealand

I am about to clean install Xp Home on my Athlon 2.2 Gbyte with 1 Gbyte of
RAM and 256 Mbyte nVidia graphics card. I have two decent HDDs, one 120
Gbyte and the other 80 Gbyte, and both are less than two years old and run
flawlessly.

As an old computer jock since early DOS days I tend to think IDE, but can
some kind person offer me any thoughts about using the SATA as the system
drive instead? It doesn't matter from my point of view, but is there some
clear advantage to using the SATA over the IDE please? Many thanks.
 
Peter, real world difference right now not much. But potentially it's
future is very promising. So, I would not trade in your IDE drives but on
next purchase I would certainly
get SATA. Even if your motherboard does not have SATA connectors you can
get a pci
Sata card.
 
Rich Barry said:
Peter, real world difference right now not much. But potentially it's
future is very promising. So, I would not trade in your IDE drives but on
next purchase I would certainly
get SATA. Even if your motherboard does not have SATA connectors you can
get a pci
Sata card.



I agree.

I recently cloned my system from an IDE drive over to a SATA drive
and have noticed no difference in how the machine operates.
 
Thanks people. I suspected as much, but really needed to hear from folk who
know more about this than I do. I do have SATA available on the mb, so I
guess I will move to that one day. In the meantime though it is on with the
XP install onto my faithful IDE drive and thank you all once again for your
helpful comments.
 
Peter in New Zealand said:
Thanks people. I suspected as much, but really needed to hear from folk who
know more about this than I do. I do have SATA available on the mb, so I
guess I will move to that one day. In the meantime though it is on with the
XP install onto my faithful IDE drive and thank you all once again for your
helpful comments.


Ok then...I suppose one of these days SATA will take over
 
Peter in New Zealand said:
I am about to clean install Xp Home on my Athlon 2.2 Gbyte with 1 Gbyte of
RAM and 256 Mbyte nVidia graphics card. I have two decent HDDs, one 120
Gbyte and the other 80 Gbyte, and both are less than two years old and run
flawlessly.

As an old computer jock since early DOS days I tend to think IDE, but can
some kind person offer me any thoughts about using the SATA as the system
drive instead? It doesn't matter from my point of view, but is there some
clear advantage to using the SATA over the IDE please? Many thanks.

Before going online, did an observational experiment on 2 SATA hard drives.
They are mapped to ide primary as master and slave in the bios. The SATA
hard drives are identical Seagate models. Master is boot drive, the other
has hidden primary partitions which are hidden clones of the master. One
NTFS partition is a logical, and identical and visible on both hard drives.
My experiment was imaging the XP partition as an image file to the logical
partition, then, the identical logical partition. On the master hard drive,
took just over 7 minutes including verification time. On the secondary,
took just over 5 minutes including verification time. Something is
obviously different on this SATA setup vs. ide on the same ide bus.
Dave
 
Just coming back on my final choice. I have clean installed XP on the IDE
drive and the SATA is in there on the secondary IDE channel as a repository
for backups and installation files. Everything seems to zip along pretty
much OK for me, and I guess in the end debate about speeds etc is at least
partly subjective. That is, if I am happy with it, then it's OK. Once again
my thanks to those who responded with helpful comments a few days ago.

Just as an aside, and at the risk of upsetting the odd Vista enthusiastic
(totally unintended) Going back from Vista to XP feels pretty good. I've
always been an early adopter from W95 days and my current hardware is built
for Vista. But I'll wait another year (or two) until Vista gets mature
before I reinstall it again.
 
Peter, I have Vista on one of my partitions and it's slow as molasses.
Granted I only have 512MB DDR Ram but WinXP loads in less than half the
time.
I helped install a HP computer with Vista, 1G of ram and dual core
AMD Processor
for my friends mother. It still was slow.
 
Well, I too had it on 1 Gbyte of RAM and an Athlon 2.2, and my experience
was very much like yours. I just didn't want to come across like one of the
folks who can Vista constantly because of some thing about it. But it IS
slower, and XP just zips along by comparison. I still like a lot about
Vista, but I'll stick with tried and trusted XP in the meantime I reackon.
Thanks for your comments.
 
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