S-ATA question...

[50]

Okay, My mobo doesn't support S-ATA, is there a PCI card or something that can let me use S-ATA on my computer or is S-ATA a mobo only thing?

 

[Dahak]

yes there is, here is an example of promise's SATA150 TX4 which is a 4 port s-ata pci addin card

and there others to by highpoing and silicon image as well ....

 

[Ionizer86]

I don't know of any SATA PCI cards, but honestly, there really is no speed advantage when most drives only sustain transfer speeds of ~60MB/s. The ATA100 and ATA133 interfaces can provide for modern drives' burst speeds of 80+ MB and can definitely provide for the limit of the hard drive.

Basically, SATA is not faster, and it's a lot more costly, so you may want to stick to your PATA instead of paying out for both a SATA controller or new board and a drive as well.

 

[CQuinn]

Well there is the potential advantage of being able to further isolate each drive to its own
channel.

I have two drives, each as master on separate channels on an ATA-100 controller, and
I can still feel the response on drive A degrade when I have some heavy activity (like a defrag)
going on Drive B. If SATA could help in that regard, then it might be worth looking into a cheap
controller.

 

[50]

I dunno if this would be worth it but I was thinking about getting rid of my WD800JB and getting a pair of S-ATA Seagate 120gb drives ($130 a piece) + a controller card on RAID 0. Worth it?

 

[StraightPipe]

keep the WD, if you go RAID0 you'll want another drive to use as backup (although it might be hard to fit 3 drives in your case)

edit: or you might just get a second WD, and run them in RAID0, (like mine) on my adaptec1200a card ($55 at circuit city) i can get tranfer rates up to 85MB/s, and averages at 72!

these are great drives, and the 3 year warranty is great. (SATA might be faster, but you probly wont be able to tell the difference)

BTW, what are you planning to run on this setup? games/vid editing/os?
RAID is good or vid editing, but berware that mine doesnt do simutaneous writes! only allows one at a time.

 

[50]

KOUTECH IO-FUTURE IO-PSA150 DUAL-CHANNEL SERIAL ATA PCI HOST CONTROLLER CARD @ $27 seems VERY reasonable! Too bad out of stock

 

[ForsakenMaster]

No western Digital Raptors are the Fastest Sata drives on the market
granted only 36 gig but the purpose of sata is speed.