Getting a hard drive... What the diff between SATA and Ultra ATA

[Marktoloba]

I'm looking to get a Seagate 200GB 7200rpm drive... They have SATA and Ultra ATA... What is the diff? Which is better? I heard SATA is better but I'm not sure. Plz some1 help i'm kind of a newb to this...

thanks

 

[ciwell]

www.storagereview.com is a helpful site. There is no real difference at this point, but SATA is "the future," so go with it.

 

[Matthias99]

OP, Maybe you should do some research first?

There's no performance difference, unless you get Western Digital 10KRPM "Raptor" SATA drive, or you have a very new SATA drive with NCQ and a very new motherboard/SATA controller that supports it (and even then, the benefits are minimal for a single-user setup).

 

[LTC8K6]

Differences?

SATA has a cool little data cable and a PITA power cable? 😀

 

[DJFury]

I have a SATA 160gb w/ NCQ and the Intel 925x(?) motherboard which I'm pretty sure supports it - will it automatically use NCQ or will I have to enable it somewhere in the BIOS, etc? Also does it matter if the drive is master or slave?

 

[dtboos]

SATA is the new standard. It has tiny tiny cables. It is hot swappable which is oh so handy for 5.25" bay harddrive kits.