Any advantages of SATA over EIDE?

[Garnet95]

I hope to be building my first PC soon and am only familiar inside a case with an EIDE component. I have had no experience with an ATA/SATA, whatever... and am hoping someone will explain the advantage or reason I should select one drive over another.
This will be my last new PC for a very long time, so I want to build one that will bear with me for quite a while and will be my best shot at any upgrades I'll need to do in the future.
I plan to run WinXP OS, on an AMD AtholonXP CPU. I haven't the foggiest on the difference between or reasons for why one and not the other in these types of Hard Drives.
If someone would please explain why one is better than another and/or the ease in building one over the other I would be extremely thankfull!

Essentially, I am asking:
Why would I install a SATA drive over an EIDE and will the choice of one or the other have a significent influence on my selection of other components?
I am just a tad nervous about this venture! Thanks in advance to everyone who offers an opinion! The more data I have the more I learn from you all!
Garnet

 

[racolvin]

At the moment there are few differences, performance-wise. Sure there are technical difference and there are plenty of resources out on the web to explain them to you, but most of the benefits of SATA won't be realized for a while yet.

The biggest current benefit that pc builders like about SATA is the cabling. Small, round cables, no daisy-chaining, etc. Makes for nice, simple connections and better airflow.

Just my $0.02

R

 

[BW86]

It isnt worth the extra money. The most looked at advantage is the smaller cabling. I would just go with eide. I have a WD 80gb 8mb cache eide and a samsung 160 8mb cache sata and i cant tell the difference.

 

[piasabird]

Wiring is narrower for SATA.

No need to have a Motherboard Chipset Driver for IDE Drives.

 

[SUOrangeman]

> It isnt worth the extra money.

If you've already got SATA onboard, I think many of you will be surprised by the rapidly shrinking cost difference between EIDE and SATA. Aside from Raptors, there aren't many reasons to go with a drive smaller than 160GB or 200GB. Once in that range, you are only talking a few dollars difference in price.

Just like the floppy drive, IDE hard drives just need to fade into history.

-SUO

 

[Garnet95]

Thanks for the reply, it is not so much money, but is is a factor... I am familiar with and eide system anyway, so this is a good thing!

 

[Garnet95]

This is what I am thinking, I'll have less stuff to stuff into a case? Less concerns, less to worry about? I just want to build a nice pc that moves, I don't NEED a screamer, with good graphics and great sound. Thanks and any follow up will be appreciated, totally!
Garnet

 

[Muzzy]

For me, the smaller cable and the easie power plug are worth it. I get nervous everytime I unplug that wide IDE cable, feeling like on of the those 80 strands of cables gonna get damage. I'm just paranoid.

 

[cyberfuzz]

buy a raptor and ull be a okay

 

[Garnet95]

Muzzy, it has been a while since this thread, but you said:

feeling like on of the those 80 strands of cables gonna get damage. I'm just paranoid.

You know what they say don't you? A paranoid person knows all the facts! ;

Garnet

 

[baumerz]

The very latest SATA with the next level of NCQ and 16MB of cache wil be a step up. Right now there isn't a really big difference. But I have been buying SATA drives for almost the same price as their EIDE counterparts and getting the benefits of the smaller cables. I hate ribbon cables.

 

[uOpt]

SATA-1 has been a disappointment for me. In fact, now that I exchange my Maxtor disk array for Seagates I get back from SATA to PATA.

The major reason is that with PATA I can have several drives on one channel, which I don't do in normal workflow, but it comes in very handy if you need to copy data to/from disks or you want more CD-ROM drives which would disturbe disks too much. I also want to move older drives after their drime lifetime into older machines or external harddrive cases which are not available now.

Under Linux, there's also the problem that SATA is re-routed over the SCSI layers. That isn't a performance problem, the layers are thing enough, but I lose some ATA-specific control which isn't routet though the SCSI layers.

With SATA-2 and tagged command queueing it will be much nicer. I also expect that by then most good mainboard will have 6 or 8 SATA connectors so that my first reason doesn't apply anymore. In fact my AMD64 board has 6 SATA and 3 PATA connectors, making you able to connect 6 drives of each variant. But my server board doesn't.

BTW, PATA UDMA-33 with a few selected IBM drives did support tagged command queueing when run on Intel BX controllers. But nobody really cared, so noone else picked it up.

 

[RGebhart]

its faster, but you cant notice it is. But it also has the small wire (Very Helpful) in wire management to make your pc look nice