SATA v IDE

[Steve]

Which is the best option to go with SATA or IDE for a single drive PC. Has
anybody had any performance issues running WIndows XP with a single SATA
drive installed?

Cheers

 

[Eric Gisin]

SATA is IDE.

| Which is the best option to go with SATA or IDE for a single drive PC. Has
| anybody had any performance issues running WIndows XP with a single SATA
| drive installed?
|
| Cheers
|
|

 

[Todd H.]

Which is the best option to go with SATA or IDE for a single drive PC. Has
anybody had any performance issues running WIndows XP with a single SATA
drive installed?

I have no references to back it up, but I recall reading recently that
bascially serial ATA isn't worth the bother over non serial ATA/IDE in
such systems.

I basically filed it under "new technology that costs more, but isn't
relevant to my usage."

 

[Rod Speed]

Which is the best option to go with SATA or IDE for a single drive PC.

There is no clear 'best'

SATA does give you a bit more future in theory if you plan to keep
the drive for quite a long time, you may eventually find that there
arent any motherboards available that support IDE/PATA anymore.

But you currently pay a price penalty for SATA and you may well
find that with hard drives so cheap that by the time motherboards
dont support IDE/PATA anymore, you dont want to use it anyway
because its too small and slow to bother with anymore.

Has anybody had any performance issues running
WIndows XP with a single SATA drive installed?

Nope.

 

[Bitter Oldman]

Which is the best option to go with SATA or IDE for a single drive PC.

As with most first-generation devices, what most of the drive manufacturers
have done is slap the SATA interface onto a regular IDE drive. You won't
be seeing that much if any performance boost by the SATA interface today,
as the drive mechanism simply cannot send the data out of the drive or
accept data into the drive as fast as the SATA interface allows. Drive
manufacturers love to quote interface specs as a measure of drive
performance, but it's all marketing hype. Even the first 66 and 100 IDE
drives were no better than a really fast 33 drive. So stick with UDMA 100
and wait a year before investing in SATA.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

SATA is IDE.

Yes, but SATA is a single device per channel interface which IDE is not.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

There's required bandwidth

as in '2 device per channel' bandwidth.

and there's unnecessary bandwidth.

Nope, there's not.

There's a reason why you don't have a 2' diameter pipe hooked
up to your toilet, and that's because your waste ain't going to
even come close to overwhelming the capacity of the pipe.

Think of 2 toilets. Think of flushing them both at the same time.

If a drive can only produce a sustained or burst transfer rate
of 44Mbits/sec, having an interface greater than 100Mbits/sec
would be overkill. I stick by my statement.

And what a statement it is.

Hard drive manufacturers bamboozle consumers by making all sorts
of claims of hard drive performance,

No, they don't.

when all they are doing is stating the specifications of the interface.

See?! Thanks for confirming what I said.

An interface's specification does not even come close to
telling the true performance of a given disk drive.

Actually it did come close with P-ATA although you needed to
know how P-ATA bandwidth is divided between two devices:
half the interface rate minus 10% overhead

So:
U-ATA 33 ~15MB/s
U-ATA 66 16MB/s - 30MB/s
U-ATA 100 31MB/s - 45MB/s
U-ATA 133 46MB/s - 60MB/s

S150 60MB/s - ~120MB/s

These first generation SATA disks are no better than an
existing UDMA 100

UDMA-133 actually.

disk that's been tuned for performance.

Nonsense.
It's just the *current* generation, P-ATA and/or SATA.

 

[Folkert Rienstra]

As with most first-generation devices, what most of the drive manufacturers
have done is slap the SATA interface onto a regular IDE drive. You won't
be seeing that much if any performance boost by the SATA interface today,

as the drive mechanism simply cannot send the data out of the drive or
accept data into the drive as fast as the SATA interface allows.

Which is how it should be.
If it wasn't, the interface would be limiting the drive.

Drive manufacturers love to quote interface specs as a measure of drive
performance, but it's all marketing hype.

No, it's not, but they may be exploiting the buyers lack of knowledge
of what the numbers actually mean.

Even the first 66 and 100 IDE drives were no better than a really fast
33 drive.

Of course they were since that is the actual reason to go over to the new
interface in the first place. And no, an ATA100 drive will at least do
(more than) 33 MB/s as that will need more than a 66MB/s interface to
not be limited when 2 such devices are used simultaniously, as in RAID.

So stick with UDMA 100 and wait a year before investing in SATA.

But use only 1 device per channel or access 1 drive per channel at a time.

 

[Bitter Oldman]

Which is how it should be.
If it wasn't, the interface would be limiting the drive.

There's required bandwidth and there's unnecessary bandwidth. There's a
reason why you don't have a 2' diameter pipe hooked up to your toilet, and
that's because your waste ain't going to even come close to overwhelming
the capacity of the pipe. If a drive can only produce a sustained or burst
transfer rate of 44Mbits/sec, having an interface greater than 100Mbits/sec
would be overkill. I stick by my statement. Hard drive manufacturers
bamboozle consumers by making all sorts of claims of hard drive
performance, when all they are doing is stating the specifications of the
interface. An interface's specification does not even come close to
telling the true performance of a given disk drive. These first generation
SATA disks are no better than an existing UDMA 100 disk that's been tuned
for performance.

 

[Mr. Grinch]

If you're just buying a PC and never plan to upgrade the drive or add
another, then ATA (IDE) is fine.

If you're the type who might want to add or upgrade drives in the future,
the SATA route is probably the better bet, if for no other reason than the
cabling is easier.

Performance differences are currently not enough to make a real difference.

If the PC has a free PCI slot, you could always add a SATA card later too.