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Drive Performance: 2m & 8m buffer ATA vs. SATA?

M

Mullzy

Senior member
Can anyone fill me in on performance increases for 2m vs 8m ATA drives? The prices aren't so different anymore so I was considering getting an 8M drive if anyone would think I'd actually notice.

And then how do the SATA drives stack up? I'm picking up an IC7 very soon and have never owned an SATA drive. Is it worth getting one?

I'm the type of person that really doesn't mind if my DivX movie file takes 5 seconds to open... or if it takes 30 seconds to copy from one drive to another.

Thoughts on drive performance?

cheers,
 
I did try several searches... about the only thing related to comparing 2mb and 8mb drives was a thread discussing which was better to use as the system drive. So I'm guessing I'm not going to notice too much either way.

Any comments on Serial ATA performance? Are there any problems mixing the 2 drive types? (i.e. Booting off a SATA drive but having 1 to 4 ATA drives in the system as well).
 
Originally posted by: Mullzy
I did try several searches... about the only thing related to comparing 2mb and 8mb drives was a thread discussing which was better to use as the system drive. So I'm guessing I'm not going to notice too much either way.

Any comments on Serial ATA performance? Are there any problems mixing the 2 drive types? (i.e. Booting off a SATA drive but having 1 to 4 ATA drives in the system as well).
Click to expand...

You can mix and match with no trouble. As far as performance between SATA and PATA there isn't much difference. With the one exception of course being the Raptors. But excluding those, a nice fast PATA drive will be pretty much the same as a nice fast SATA drive. I would still recommend SATA though. They are not much more expensive, and you get the groovy thin cables.
 
the diff between 2mb and 8mb is about 20 - 30%. I have an 8mb and the difference is AMAZING! It was like I bought a new computer.

Edit: If you dont mind bulky cables spend your money on the 8mb cache, it will show more perfomance improvement than SATA.
 
A drive with an 8 MB busffer would offer a marginal performance increase over those with 2 MB. The same applies to SATA drives, which are marginally better performers than PATA. Overall, buying a drive with an 8 mb buffer & an SATA interface cant hurt too much.

Look here and here for more.
 
With 8 Megs of Cache you gain a bit of performance if you aren't interested in performance and the drive with only 2 megs is cheaper then get that. as far as SATA the perform pretty much identical to the corresponding IDE drives from a select manufacture. The only real drives that offer more performance are the WD Raptors and they don't offer more performance because they are SATA, their performance lies only to their faster RPM's.
 
appearently nobody has mentioned this - drive interface means NOTHING. it is the drive that determins the speed, not the interface. (unless the interface is slower than the drive, but that is not the situation with any drive on the market)
 
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