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2 ATA 133 drives or 1 ATA and 1 SATA

J

jelifah

Senior member
With Hard Drive prices falling I've been contemplating buying a new 250+GB drive. I know that the performance difference from ATA133 to SATA isn't really noticeable. But, will I see a difference if I change my setup from

2 drives on an ATA 133 cable
to
1 drive on an ATA 133 and the other on SATA?

I'm guessing my disk to disk copy speed may increase a little bit, since the bandwidth of both drives won't be stuck on one cable. But will anything else really 'matter'

Yes/No/Maybe?
 
Disc to disc would probably increase a little, also newer drives are faster drives, and no one is building cutting edge PATA drives that i know of.

Matter? Not really.
Be better? Slightly.
Worth the money? Depends on how much more it will cost you.
 
Even putting both drives on the same cable doesn't generally cause that much difference. Having said that I still have all my PATA drives on their own cables, mostly because I can with only a few drives. Really, the difference will be noticed if you sit around and benchmark. If you are going to just use the drives, however, you aren't going to notice the difference.

\Dan
 
A bit off the OP's topic, but how about if you were doing a RAID-1 setup with 1 2mb cache PATA drive mirroring an 8mb cache SATA drive? Would the older drive slow everything down?
 
Having each drive on its own channel should yield best performance under most conditions. But a large r/w memory buffer or cache could lessen the single-cable trasfer penalty quite a bit. If I had my druthers (read plenty of money), I'd probably have SATA HDs and save the PATA channels for optical and other slower drives.

OTOH, I do SCSI here so I don't spend a whole lot of worrying about the vicissitudes of the SATA/PATA world.

.bh.
 
When the drives are on separate cables (channels) they are able to be accessed simultaneously. Otherwise, you can only access one drive at a time. So you should see some sort of performance increase, possibly noticeable when you copy large files between them.
 
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