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PATA or SATA (When used on 100Mb xDSL)?

D

Deadtrees

Platinum Member
When SATA first came out, I read that SATA doesn't really offer anything more than PATA does.
However, time has passed and I'm wondering if SATA drives got any better and that I should get SATA drives.
One thing that I'm concerned is that I'll be using this new drive at home with 100Mbit xDSL of heavy downloading.
 
Nope, still no significant improvement over PATA. If your current PATA HDs ain't broken or out of warranty, use the money you plan on getting SATA for something else. And no, getting a SATA won't make you d/l faster.
 
Originally posted by: Baked
Nope, still no significant improvement over PATA. If your current PATA HDs ain't broken or out of warranty, use the money you plan on getting SATA for something else. And no, getting a SATA won't make you d/l faster.
Click to expand...

When I used 10mbit VDSL doing massive amount of P2P upload/download, it seemed like my HDD was chocking. Well, that's just what it felt like.
 
Well, what does the download manager's speed say... forget http d/l, what does your FTP download speed say?
 
Originally posted by: Baked
Well, what does the download manager's speed say... forget http d/l, what does your FTP download speed say?
Click to expand...

I've never used FTPs but just P2Ps. Most of the time, my 10Mbit up/ 10Mbit download was maxed out. If I have enough money and purposes, I would have gotton a SCSI drive or setup a IDE raid. However, I still do not have enough money nor purposes of doing so.
 
I'm not sure if it will work in the real world, but you'd think that a NCQ-capable SATA drive (like the new Seagates) might be better able to handle heavy P2P use since NCQ tends to bost performance in server environments. NCQ doesn't seem to help much in a single-user desktop environment from the benches I've seen, but it seems to me that if you've got multiple Torrents going you're going to start acting more like a server and thus might start seeing some benefit of having the drive able to intellegently que all of the reads and writes.

You'll need a new Intel 915 or 925 chipset or a nForce 4 to be able to use NCQ on these new drives, though (I'm not sure if there are any NCQ-capable add-in cards yet).
 
Originally posted by: Deadtrees
When SATA first came out, I read that SATA doesn't really offer anything more than PATA does.
However, time has passed and I'm wondering if SATA drives got any better and that I should get SATA drives.
One thing that I'm concerned is that I'll be using this new drive at home with 100Mbit xDSL of heavy downloading.
Click to expand...
1. SATA offers slightly faster bursts. ENough to show an improvement across the board in office benches, but not enough to matter to anyone.
2. If you want more speed, get a Raptor (SATA) or go SCSI.

There is one option that could help a bit, though. Have a separate HDD as storage. OS, main apps, and swap file on your current HDD, and then this HDD gets those P2P files.

As far as NCQ, it could help, but make sure the controller is capable of using it.
 
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