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SATA Harddrives !?!?

H

hellomcfly

Member
ok im going to be ordering my new parts hopefully in aweek or so. and im kinda confused about SATA harddrives.. im going to be ordering a 60 or 80 or 120 gig drive depending on price and form.. right now i only have a 20gig hd in this computer and im only useing like 12gigs so space is not a huge thing to me.. i was thinking about ordering the Western Digital : Special Edition IDE 80gig hd with 8mb buffer (80.00) .. what would the differance be with a SATA drive if im only useing 1 drive.

also does anyone have a pic of a SATA drive in their computer and connection to the Mobo
 
So far I don't think sata drives come in a 60Gb size, Also western digital only offers sata drives with a 10,00rpm spindle speed at 36GB. Larger sata drives from WD have been announced but with 7200 rpm. If you are going to get a 80GB and higher sata drive its probably going to be from either seagate or maxtor, both brands are good.

If you have an old motherboard (I am assuming you do, because you are still using a 20gb HD) then you will either need a sata controller card or a new motherboard. Some, if not all retail package sata drives come with controller cards.
 
great, then go with a 865/875 chipset based motherboard because they have native serail ata support, if you are building an intel system.
 
linkage

SATA in itself doesn't have much of an advantage over IDE because the 150MB/s theoretical transfer speeds will be cut back down to 133MB/s as soon as it hits the PCI bus. The drives themselves aren't faster simply because of SATA... if SATA drives are faster than IDE, it's most likely because of new changes made to the drive. The only advantage is that typically, SATA drives use about 1/5 of the CPU time that IDE drives use.
The one exception to this is the Western Digital Raptor. It's a SATA drive, but unlike every other SATA drive that has a 7,200 RPM spindle speed, the Raptor is 10,000 RPM. That's what makes it faster, not the fact that it uses SATA.

The only advantage I see with SATA is the size of the cables it uses. But then again, you could either modify your ATA cables, or buy rounded cables and get pretty much the same advantages as SATA cables, which is increased airflow. One downside to the SATA cables I've heard is that because they're so small, they get pulled out of the connectors easily... for me that wouldn't be a problem, cause I don't crawl around inside my computer case
rolleye.gif
... but... that is a complaint that a few places have mentioned in their reviews of SATA drives.
 
yes i will be building a 2.4c or better with probly a IC7 or IS7 motherboard .. so the raptor would be good or just stick with the WD:SE ??
 
I'd get the raptor. If you don't need the size, go for the speed.

And personally, I like SATA connectors MUCH more than even rounded cables. They are simply easier to install. Never worry about Master/Slave again. Just plug them in and be happy.

 
my co worker has a baracudda 160gb, native sata support would be faster.., less restriction on the pci bus
 
Originally posted by: Jeff7181
SATA in itself doesn't have much of an advantage over IDE because the 150MB/s theoretical transfer speeds will be cut back down to 133MB/s as soon as it hits the PCI bus. The drives themselves aren't faster simply because of SATA... if SATA drives are faster than IDE, it's most likely because of new changes made to the drive. The only advantage is that typically, SATA drives use about 1/5 of the CPU time that IDE drives use.
Click to expand...

Also since most setups never even reach close to the theoretical 150/133 bandwidth, there's not much of an issue there. Although with PCI-Express coming, which would change the setup of how HDD connects to the CPU, SATA might not be all that bad ...
 
Originally posted by: TheInvincibleMustard
Originally posted by: Jeff7181
SATA in itself doesn't have much of an advantage over IDE because the 150MB/s theoretical transfer speeds will be cut back down to 133MB/s as soon as it hits the PCI bus. The drives themselves aren't faster simply because of SATA... if SATA drives are faster than IDE, it's most likely because of new changes made to the drive. The only advantage is that typically, SATA drives use about 1/5 of the CPU time that IDE drives use.
Click to expand...

Also since most setups never even reach close to the theoretical 150/133 bandwidth, there's not much of an issue there. Although with PCI-Express coming, which would change the setup of how HDD connects to the CPU, SATA might not be all that bad ...
Click to expand...

2 Raptors in RAID 0 gets pretty close. But still... it'll be a LONG time before hard drives are so fast that we "need" more bandwidth to transfer data from them.
 
In my testing with my SCSI card, the practical limit for a 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus is about 121Mb/second, probably due to overhead. That's on either nForce classic or nForce2. So it will be nice when we're finally free of that bottleneck. Darn it, if nForce3 Pro 250 only had a 64-bit PCI bus... 😛

The WD360GD has a nice quick seek time in addition to the 10000rpm motor. It uses a ball-bearing motor like most of the Western Digital JB-series, which are known for sometimes developing a strong bearing whine, so I'll be watching to see what happens there... as an enterprise drive it might not matter, but as the new sweetheart of the enthusiast market... :Q
 
Originally posted by: mechBgon
In my testing with my SCSI card, the practical limit for a 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus is about 121Mb/second, probably due to overhead. That's on either nForce classic or nForce2. So it will be nice when we're finally free of that bottleneck. Darn it, if nForce3 Pro 250 only had a 64-bit PCI bus... 😛

The WD360GD has a nice quick seek time in addition to the 10000rpm motor. It uses a ball-bearing motor like most of the Western Digital JB-series, which are known for sometimes developing a strong bearing whine, so I'll be watching to see what happens there... as an enterprise drive it might not matter, but as the new sweetheart of the enthusiast market... :Q
Click to expand...

ooooh, thats what the high pitched sound is :-\
 
Using a SATA drive would free up a PATA connector though, so you could go for 4 optical drives and your HDD's on SATA, or 6 HDD's, or something like that.

If you get SATA drives, any extra PATA drives you want you could add to the motherboard without buying a PCI card to give you extra PATA devices, so in a way it just frees up some PATA thingies, and if the price isn't too bad for you, you might as well go for it.
 
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