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Could someone explain why SATA is better than PATA?

I

iamtrout

Diamond Member
I'm a bit confused on whether I should upgrade to SATA or not, meaning replace both my WD120GB and WD80GBSE.

My friend says he notices a speed different with SATA, but I don't understand why it would be faster.

Barring the 10,000RPM ones, if a SATA and PATA HD both have the same 7200RPM speed and amount of cache, why would the SATA be faster? Isn't it all about the spindle speed and cache anyway?
 
I don't think SATA is necessarily faster, because even with PATA, you never exceed the ATA133 bandwidth. I'd only upgrade because of the convience of the wiring.
 
higher theoretical throughput
smaller cables
and eventually Native Command Queueing - which should actually improve speed

Currently the price difference does not make up for the smaller cables, the choice between a PATA 160GB for $70 and a SATA 160GB for $110 is pretty simple to me. Although. if I could find a SATA at equal price I would go for the SATA without a second thought.
 
One advantage may be the possibility of using a Raptor 10,000 rpm drive which is SATA. If you choose to use a 7200rpm drive with one or 2 hard drives which do not have RAID, then there is no advantage. It is only when you have around 4 or more hard drives using RAID that there is some possibility of ATA100/133 not being able to provide enough throughput of the data. It is reading the data on the drives and not the throughput that is slowing down the computer the most. Most users at a residence do not use RAID as far as I know.

Another advantage is the sizes some of the SATA drives come in.

On the other hand Maxtor is selling a 40gb hard drive for about $48 which is a pretty good price. I do not download music and I can not afford to buy a lot of games, and I do not put a lot of pictures or video on my computer and there is little chance of my needing more space than that.
 
From a theoretical perspective, SATA is not much better YET. But it will be.

We are about at the limits of PATA. Much faster, and signal quality and skew problem get multiplied. SATA, on the other hand, should be able to easily quadruple in speed over the next few years.

However, you still have the problems of spinning the platter faster. Hmmm.
 
Originally posted by: whitelight
I don't think SATA is necessarily faster, because even with PATA, you never exceed the ATA133 bandwidth. I'd only upgrade because of the convience of the wiring.
Click to expand...

 
Ok, thanks for the reply. I was just confused because my friend said that switching to a SATA drive give him much faster Battlefield loading times and whatnot, and I couldn't get over the fact that that was happening considering platter speeds are the same.

I don't know if I should RAID... striped (RAID0) sounds wayyyy too risky for me, even though I've never had a hard drive die on me before, and the thought of getting two 120's just to have overall 120GB (RAID1) seems like a complete waste of money to me. All that extra space... just a copy... waste.
 
Originally posted by: iamtrout
Ok, thanks for the reply. I was just confused because my friend said that switching to a SATA drive give him much faster Battlefield loading times and whatnot, and I couldn't get over the fact that that was happening considering platter speeds are the same.
Click to expand...

Probably just moved from a 3 yr old PATA 7200rpm, 2mb cache drive to a brand new SATA - which would likely have been 7200rpm, but with 8mb cache and a higher areal density. Thus, faster speeds. It would indeed be a noticeable improvement, was very easy for me to notice going from a Maxtor DM+ 60 to a Seagate 7200.7.


 
Originally posted by: iamtrout
I don't know if I should RAID... striped sounds wayyyy too risky for me, even though I've never had a hard drive die on me before, and the thought of getting two 120's just to have overall 120GB seems like a complete waste of money to me. All that extra space... just a copy... waste.
Click to expand...
Striping (RAID0) uses the full space of both disks and increases speed. You have it mixed up with mirroring (RAID1), which puts a duplicate copy of the first drive onto the second.
 
Originally posted by: Hugenstein
higher theoretical throughput
smaller cables
and eventually Native Command Queueing - which should actually improve speed

Currently the price difference does not make up for the smaller cables, the choice between a PATA 160GB for $70 and a SATA 160GB for $110 is pretty simple to me. Although. if I could find a SATA at equal price I would go for the SATA without a second thought.
Click to expand...

he nailed it.
 
Originally posted by: iamtrout
I'm a bit confused on whether I should upgrade to SATA or not, meaning replace both my WD120GB and WD80GBSE.
Click to expand...

you dont have to replace your old drives, you can still keep and use them, just get a new motherboard with an sata controller :beer:
 
Hmmmm... aureal density... never thought of that. Where can I get information on comparing aureal densities? I suspect a 120GB with, say, 4 platters has a higher density than one with 6 platters. Anyone know how many platters a 80GB WD SE is, compared to current SATA?

quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: MDE
Striping (RAID0) uses the full space of both disks and increases speed. You have it mixed up with mirroring (RAID1), which puts a duplicate copy of the first drive onto the second.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry, my bad. Didn't make it clear enough.

I don't know if I should RAID... striped (RAID0) sounds wayyyy too risky for me, even though I've never had a hard drive die on me before, and the thought of getting two 120's just to have overall 120GB (RAID1) seems like a complete waste of money to me. All that extra space... just a copy... waste.
 
Originally posted by: iamtrout
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: MDE
Striping (RAID0) uses the full space of both disks and increases speed. You have it mixed up with mirroring (RAID1), which puts a duplicate copy of the first drive onto the second.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry, my bad. Didn't make it clear enough.

I don't know if I should RAID... striped (RAID0) sounds wayyyy too risky for me, even though I've never had a hard drive die on me before, and the thought of getting two 120's just to have overall 120GB (RAID1) seems like a complete waste of money to me. All that extra space... just a copy... waste.
Click to expand...
RAID0 would not give you a copy, if you use two 120GB drives you'd have 240GB of available space. The downside to the speed and space kept is that if one drive dies, all of the data on that RAID array is gone forever.
 
Originally posted by: MDE
Originally posted by: iamtrout
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: MDE
Striping (RAID0) uses the full space of both disks and increases speed. You have it mixed up with mirroring (RAID1), which puts a duplicate copy of the first drive onto the second.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry, my bad. Didn't make it clear enough.

I don't know if I should RAID... striped (RAID0) sounds wayyyy too risky for me, even though I've never had a hard drive die on me before, and the thought of getting two 120's just to have overall 120GB (RAID1) seems like a complete waste of money to me. All that extra space... just a copy... waste.
Click to expand...
RAID0 would not give you a copy, if you use two 120GB drives you'd have 240GB of available space. The downside to the speed and space kept is that if one drive dies, all of the data on that RAID array is gone forever.
Click to expand...

He's not saying it does... look at the bolded section
 
Originally posted by: Jeff7181
Originally posted by: MDE
Originally posted by: iamtrout
quote:

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Originally posted by: MDE
Striping (RAID0) uses the full space of both disks and increases speed. You have it mixed up with mirroring (RAID1), which puts a duplicate copy of the first drive onto the second.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Sorry, my bad. Didn't make it clear enough.

I don't know if I should RAID... striped (RAID0) sounds wayyyy too risky for me, even though I've never had a hard drive die on me before, and the thought of getting two 120's just to have overall 120GB (RAID1) seems like a complete waste of money to me. All that extra space... just a copy... waste.
Click to expand...
RAID0 would not give you a copy, if you use two 120GB drives you'd have 240GB of available space. The downside to the speed and space kept is that if one drive dies, all of the data on that RAID array is gone forever.
Click to expand...

He's not saying it does... look at the bolded section
Click to expand...
😱
Oops. Should have read it a bit more closely.
 
Is there an article covering all t his RAID stuff?

RAID0 = storage added but if one dies, all data lost
RAID1 = 2 copies?

Can harddrives be raided with SATA?

<<Hard drive newbie
 
The main reason for RAID 1 is not just a copy, but a copy that will take over on the fly if the "primary" fails. I have my wife set up that way since everything her business does is on the computer. She can't afford to risk losing it, and probably would lose valuable (billable) time if a single drive died and I had to restore from backup. In her case, the cost of the extra drive (36.7 Raptor) is an insurance policy.

On my own system, which stores less critical stuff and can wait for a restore from backup if needed, RAID 1 is not worth it.

I think a lot of people set up RAID 0s just because they can. If that's what they want, who am I to question it?

 
Is there a way to raid different partitions on the same drive?

Say that I have a Games partition that I don't really care if it gets wiped out. Could I RAID0 this partition and on the same 2 drives have a partition of mission critical data that I RAID1 with?

Drive 1..................Drive 2

Partition1...RAID0...Partition 1
GAMES.....................GAMES
GAMES.....................GAMES
GAMES.....................GAMES

Partition2...RAID1...Partition2
..MISSION CRITICAL DATA..
..MISSION CRITICAL DATA..
 
To quote from Anand's RAID benchmark article:

...there is no place, and no need for a RAID-0 array on a desktop computer. The real world performance increases are negligible at best and the reduction in reliability, thanks to a halving of the mean time between failure, makes RAID-0 far from worth it on the desktop.

In just about all the benchmark tests that were run, RAID-0 only increased real-world performance by a tiny amount (even the multimedia content creation tests didn't show more than a 3% speed increase). Really not worth it, even with a pair of Raptors.
 
no, raid is setup on the drive level and therefore you cannot have 2 types of raid on the same set of disks.
 
Originally posted by: iamtrout
Is there a way to raid different partitions on the same drive?
Click to expand...

You can create multiple volumes with different RAID levels on a pair of drives on the new Intel 925 boards with the Matrix RAID, but so far no other RAID controllers out there can pull this off.

Check it out.
 
PATA is being transitioned OUT of the market. So, its not that SATA is "better" since the performance is the same. Its that in the future, PATA wont be made.

Btw, SATA is better once PCI Express becomes primary and not new. The performance enhancements that could be made into SATA drives is not yet there since some still use PATA-SATA bridges on some drives.

I'd say in a year or 2, this argument will be fodder especially with all the super-duper-ultra-special edition motherboards that have a dozen SATA ports on them...
 
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