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Educate me on IDE vs. SATA

G

giantpinkbunnyhead

Diamond Member
I'm looking for a new HDD, and need some help deciding whether to go with an IDE or SATA. I'm not too up on the differences between the types. I found an IDE drive, 300GB, ATA 133, for $105 and then I found a SATA drive, 250GB, 3.0G/s, for only $90. Both are 7200 RPM, 16MB cache sizes. Either drive has more space than I need so that's less of an issue, I think I'm more concerned with performance and/or being more futureproof. Thoughts?
 
SATA is a bit faster by the numbers, but the real world difference of load times between those two drives you listed is pretty negligible, like a second or something unnoticable. SATA is the way to go nowadays though. I get them for the smaller pin ribbons (cable) as compared to the old fat 40/80 pin ribbons of IDE drives...basically, SATA would be better for airflow.
 
SATA just seems much cleaner(inside case) as far as performance goes you probably wont notice a difference.

SATA is also "hot swapable"
 
hot swappable means the drive can be changed while the computer is running. This is uesfull for servers and RAID arrays (other than RAID0). If a drive dies, you just swap it out.
 
Just got 2 SATA drives for $6 more than my usual IDEs. Even got a SATA2 for the $2 more. My old IDEs are on my Video Rig & Linux machines.

I've have now installed SATAs in my new Graphic workstation. If the prices keep dropping, we all should be getting bargains.
 
Hi, You already got some good replies. Not mentioned is that the S in SATA stands for SERIAL data transfer. ATA uses Parallel transfer. Parallel is 8 bits per cycle and Serial is 1 bit per cycle. Rated as Bytes per second for parallel and bits per second for Serial. The real time is used by the drive writing the data, so the transfer speed is not all that important. The drive itself is pretty much the same in either. Hope this helps a bit, Jim
 
Performance, not all that much difference in all likelyhood, but it does depend on what drives they are, maxtor are rather slow and WD/hitachi are rather fast, seagate are somewhere in the middle as are samsung.

Futureproofing, the old ATA interface is being phased out, if you're going to upgrade the computer in a year or so and move the HD accross then the SATA one is the one to go for.
 
Originally posted by: Tig Ol Bitties
SATA is a bit faster by the numbers, but the real world difference of load times between those two drives you listed is pretty negligible, like a second or something unnoticable. SATA is the way to go nowadays though. I get them for the smaller pin ribbons (cable) as compared to the old fat 40/80 pin ribbons of IDE drives...basically, SATA would be better for airflow.
Click to expand...

In some cases where a manufacturer offers the same model in SATA and PATA aka IDE the PATA model is actually faster than the SATA.
 
I'd go SATA if possible. I was just thinking of this but it's kinda like the difference between a PS2 mouse and keyboard and a USB mouse and keyboard.

YOU! decide.....
 
I like Serial ATA just for the fact that the cables are a whole lot smaller and easier to deal with than the old ribbon type cables for Parallel ATA.
 
Originally posted by: pukemon
I like Serial ATA just for the fact that the cables are a whole lot smaller and easier to deal with than the old ribbon type cables for Parallel ATA.
Click to expand...

:thumbsup: Exactly.
 
Originally posted by: Googer
Originally posted by: Tig Ol Bitties
SATA is a bit faster by the numbers, but the real world difference of load times between those two drives you listed is pretty negligible, like a second or something unnoticable. SATA is the way to go nowadays though. I get them for the smaller pin ribbons (cable) as compared to the old fat 40/80 pin ribbons of IDE drives...basically, SATA would be better for airflow.
Click to expand...

In some cases where a manufacturer offers the same model in SATA and PATA aka IDE the PATA model is actually faster than the SATA.
Click to expand...

That's only because they aren't using a native SATA interface in most cases. They have a chip that converts PATA to SATA on the hard drive, and that obviously affects speeds. Native SATA hard drives are not slower, within the same brand/RPM/cache/etc.

There's no real performance difference, as long as you're comparing single drives. Something else besides that which was mentioned so far (hot-swap, NCQ, etc) is that Serial ATA is obviously a Serial interface, which means hard drives aren't competing for the same bandwidth. If you had two very fast hard drives on the same Parallel ATA controller, you can get starved for bandwidth easily when both are doing intensive operations. With Serial ATA, everything has its own dedicated bandwidth. That's a plus to me. It's also like PCI-E vs PCI, every device gets it's own bandwidth, the benefit of such a serial interface.
 
Originally posted by: Continuity28
Originally posted by: Googer
Originally posted by: Tig Ol Bitties
SATA is a bit faster by the numbers, but the real world difference of load times between those two drives you listed is pretty negligible, like a second or something unnoticable. SATA is the way to go nowadays though. I get them for the smaller pin ribbons (cable) as compared to the old fat 40/80 pin ribbons of IDE drives...basically, SATA would be better for airflow.
Click to expand...

In some cases where a manufacturer offers the same model in SATA and PATA aka IDE the PATA model is actually faster than the SATA.
Click to expand...

That's only because they aren't using a native SATA interface in most cases. They have a chip that converts PATA to SATA on the hard drive, and that obviously affects speeds. Native SATA hard drives are not slower, within the same brand/RPM/cache/etc.

There's no real performance difference, as long as you're comparing single drives. Something else besides that which was mentioned so far (hot-swap, NCQ, etc) is that Serial ATA is obviously a Serial interface, which means hard drives aren't competing for the same bandwidth. If you had two very fast hard drives on the same Parallel ATA controller, you can get starved for bandwidth easily when both are doing intensive operations. With Serial ATA, everything has its own dedicated bandwidth. That's a plus to me. It's also like PCI-E vs PCI, every device gets it's own bandwidth, the benefit of such a serial interface.
Click to expand...

I know there is on brand that is not affected by the bridge chip soldered on it's PCB. (It might be WD)
 
SATA is less tasking on CPU resources as well and SATA-II can scale to 3Gbits/sec although I haven't seen anything that could hit that high with a hard drive before.
 
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