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Hard Drive Type = bottleneck?

R

Roocifer

Junior Member
Hey guys,

I'm putting together a new machine:

AM2 Athlon 64 3800+ Orleans 2.4 ghz (single core)
2Gigs GSkill PC6400 800mhz
EVGA 7900GTO
GIGABYTE GA-M55plus-S3G Socket AM2/GeForce 6100 Motherboard
600Watt Rosewill PSU

QUESTION: Will the overall performance suffer (significantly) if I put my old IDE drives into this machine, rather than a new SATA (3.0 gb/s)? Will I be bottlenecking these new parts by using an old 7200PATA drive?

Thanks for your input!
 
"Suffer significantly?" I would say not really suffer, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice.

You will notice a difference b/t your old IDE drive and new 16MB cache SATA drive. That extra cache over the IDE (older IDE drives made do with 2MB of cache) will add a significant amount of "snappiness" to the new rig.

For less than $100, you can get a 320GB Seagate .10 series

You picked nice parts out, don't skimp now. Remember, the HD is the slowest part in any system. Get the best you can afford...another $100, but very well spent!
 
I don't think it would be that significant of a bottleneck. However, hard drives are not that expense so why not throw a new SATA in there to just to shave off a little bit of loading time since you are already buying pretty much everything else new.
 
Thanks for the input guys!

I'm teetering on pulling the trigger on a drive like MichaelD suggested. It's just that I'm an incredibly stingy mofo, so I need a little prodding. I know if I don't do it, I'll always be wondering if the drive is slowing me down.

Since the rest of the parts are arriving within the next day or two, I don't have the patience to wait for the drive to ship from NewEgg. Looks like I may be swinging by Best Buy...

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage.jsp...p=5&type=product&cp=1&id=1130985130674
 
Originally posted by: MichaelD
"Suffer significantly?" I would say not really suffer, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice.

You will notice a difference b/t your old IDE drive and new 16MB cache SATA drive. That extra cache over the IDE (older IDE drives made do with 2MB of cache) will add a significant amount of "snappiness" to the new rig.

For less than $100, you can get a 320GB Seagate .10 series

You picked nice parts out, don't skimp now. Remember, the HD is the slowest part in any system. Get the best you can afford...another $100, but very well spent!
Click to expand...

Older IDE drives had 2 MB of cache, but newer IDE drives usually have 8 MB of cache. Which dramatically reduces the performance delta between them and even the best SATA drives. "Less than $100" may not sound like much (though it sure does to me), but if it doesn't accomplish anything useful... it's still a waste of money.

OP, what are you using this system for? And why are you buying such a crappy power supply? Spend the money to replace that power supply with something decent first, then decide if you can afford a new hard drive.
 
i've said it before and i'll say it again: for the vast majority of desktop users, upgrading almost any component other than the HD will provide more noticeable performance benefits... that is, you'd be much more likely to notice a difference from upgrading the CPU, RAM or Video card than upgrading from PATA to SATA.

assuming your PATA drives have an 8mb cache and are 7200rpm, the difference in theoretical benchmarks between your PATA HD and a 7200.10 (perp recording) SATA drive will be << 20%. In real life, it'll prob be <5%. basically, windows and games will load faster, and that's about it. spend the extra money on the HD only if your system is already maxed and you have money left to burn OR you are one of the very few users who needs extreme hard drive performance (multi user environments, such as file servers, for example).

you might wanna upgrade that PSU instead 😉
 
My suggestion still stands; the user said "old IDE drives." Don't know if that means "old" as in 20GB size old or "old" as in "bought them last year."

Either way, you win. If they are indeed OLD, the performance diff will be very noticeable. If they are newer, "old" drives, they probably won't be anywhere near 320GB in size.

Oh, I missed your PS in the original post. YES! Replace that POS with something decent.
 
I admit, the PSU was kind of a questionable purchase. But, I'm hopeful this one will be sufficient. I view Rosewill as a "no frillls" brand that delivers dependability.

I'll have my electronics guru buddy run voltmeter tests on this thing to make sure it's not horseshit. There were many reviews, and all were 100% positive (whatever that's worth). And I'm not running SLI, so...we'll see.
 
Originally posted by: Aluvus
Originally posted by: MichaelD
"Suffer significantly?" I would say not really suffer, but you'd be doing yourself a disservice.

You will notice a difference b/t your old IDE drive and new 16MB cache SATA drive. That extra cache over the IDE (older IDE drives made do with 2MB of cache) will add a significant amount of "snappiness" to the new rig.

For less than $100, you can get a 320GB Seagate .10 series

You picked nice parts out, don't skimp now. Remember, the HD is the slowest part in any system. Get the best you can afford...another $100, but very well spent!
Click to expand...

Older IDE drives had 2 MB of cache, but newer IDE drives usually have 8 MB of cache. Which dramatically reduces the performance delta between them and even the best SATA drives. "Less than $100" may not sound like much (though it sure does to me), but if it doesn't accomplish anything useful... it's still a waste of money.

OP, what are you using this system for? And why are you buying such a crappy power supply? Spend the money to replace that power supply with something decent first, then decide if you can afford a new hard drive.
Click to expand...

I'll be using this machine for gaming, as well as music recording (and web surfing). The 160Gb IDE drive I have is surely 8mb cache. Just bought it about a year ago.
 
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