PATA vs. SATA drives

[faye]

Hi, this question may seems old, but i am confused...

having a PATA drive:
Western Digital Caviar WD800JB (80.0GB ATA-100)

and SATA drive:
Seagate Barracua ATA V SATA Review (120 GB SATA)

people say SATA drive is faster bescause it is serial link up not parallel link up

but in www.storagereview.com
the ata drive beat sata drive in almost every column, can someone please tell me what is going on?

because building a new pc, people will use sata drive. and if building a new pc, why use slower part

 

[jaydee]

because building a new pc, people will use sata drive. and if building a new pc, why use slower part

The smaller cables and similar prices are enough for me to go SATA for my next hard drive. The 1.5 millisecond or whatever difference in seek time is so minut, I doubt you'll notice.

 

[Agamar]

I guess I am going to have to wait until I get a new motherboard, since the PCI solutions are bound by the speed of PCI. Damnit, I hate upgrading my CPU!!!

 

[adams828]

i'm curious as well.. i'm looking into upgrading, and the mobo version (asus a7n8x) which has sata is almost $40 more! the sata HD isn't that much more difference, but is there enough difference in speed that i'll notice? basically, i surf the internet a lot, do some photoshop, some gaming, and watch divx occasionally (but no video editing)

 

[jackschmittusa]

SATA is in general, pretty much on a par with PATA at this introductory stage. The next generation of SATA ( early next year?) will be a real improvement over PATA.

 

[adams828]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
SATA is in general, pretty much on a par with PATA at this introductory stage. The next generation of SATA ( early next year?) will be a real improvement over PATA.

so i assume that next gen. sata means, next generation *drives* right?

grr... stupid love/hate relationship of technology growing so fast!!!

 

[faye]

Originally posted by: jackschmittusa
SATA is in general, pretty much on a par with PATA at this introductory stage. The next generation of SATA ( early next year?) will be a real improvement over PATA.

early next year? that will be very soon.
how much of a gain?

i am debating either sata and pata... and also wd raptor.

i also play games, browse, photos but not editing

 

[billyjak]

I have the Raptors 36gig and the WD1200JB.
I can only see a difference when I copy DVD's between the two.
Also note the Sata cables are smaller , but they are not as resiliant as a Pata connector, mine keeps comming off when I move my box around, they should have made a locking clip on the connection ports.
They can come up with the technologyfor Sata but can't make a simple connector design to stay in place. Go figure
Pata drives should suit you fine.

 

[ToxicWaste]

SATA drives and controllers do more of the processing of the reads and writes. So, a SATA drive uses sightly less CPU than the same read/write task on a PATA drive. The numbers I've seen on an upperend P4 where like 3% CPU utilization with a SATA drive versus 6% for the PATA drive.

 

[faye]

oic, does it matter if i use a standalone controller card than an onboard controller?

 

[EeyoreX]

SATA is in general, pretty much on a par with PATA at this introductory stage. The next generation of SATA ( early next year?) will be a real improvement over PATA.

No they won't. SATA by itself is no silver bullet to eliminate the bottleneck of hard drive speeds. The current SATA interface supports speeds of up to 150MB/s. Current ATA drives can not even (singly and hardly ever even in RAID configurations) saturate the ATA66 bus. Why? Because the hardware can't keep up. Next gen SATA (which bumps maximum speeds to twice current, to 300MB/s) won't do jack to help until drive hardware can feed that bus speed. The current fastest ATA drive (WD Raptor) @10,000 rpms can not physically spin fast enough to saturate 150MB/s, much less 300. Until such time that drives can saturate the bus, bus speed increases won't help in any significant way, except to be ready for the day when drives can maintain speeds to saturate them. The biggests benefit of SATAs second itineration will be true hot swapping (with proper software and PSU support), and the continued simplicity of cable size and installation.

\Dan