Can you tell the difference between EIDE and SATA HDD's?

[amheck]

Hi everyone,

I'm getting the AMD Tech Tour Bundle and thus basically upgrading my whole system - new ram, video card, PSU, etc. I have never used a SATA drive before. Now I currently use a Seagate 120gig EIDE with the wide ribbon cable. I'm sinking about $700-$800 into the new system, which should be a pretty good upgrade, but I was planning on using my old HDD.

Do you think I'd notice any more improvement going with a new SATA drive? I always thought I'd go with the Raptor, but when it comes down to it, man they're expensive. I have been looking at the Seagate 7200.8 drives and they look pretty nice. Worthwhile upgrade over my EIDE drives? I hate to stop using a perfectly good EIDE drive, though.......

Aaron

 

[neutralizer]

There's no performance difference as far as I can tell, but SATA wires are nice.

 

[ryanv12]

If you were going to buy a new drive, buy SATA, but if your drive is already an IDE it's fine. I can already hardly tell a difference between my SATA Raptor and my IDE WD 120 GB hard drives

 

[amheck]

So maybe I should just buy some rounded cables and be set with my EIDE drive for the time being.....

thanks for the reply. I was kinda thinking everyone was going to say SATA was so much faster.

 

[Lonyo]

SATA is IDE.
PATA is IDE.
SATA drives are no faster than regular PATA drives unless you get Raptors, which are faster because of their 10k rpm speed.
SATA allows more theoretical bandwidth, but hard drives don't usually saturate PATA, so it doesn't make much difference.