SATA or not?

[4x4expy]

I am about to buy another HD in the 120-200 GB range. Would I be better served by a SATA drive(my BH7 has 1 sata port), or by a cheaper but well respected 8mb cache drive? I plan to use this new drive to hold my OS and possibly run a single drive only. Any ideas or recommendations welcome.

 

[Corporate Thug]

personally, i would just get a 8mb cache drive

 

[pspada]

Yup, go for the 8mg cache. SATA is much less cost effective at this time, and most of the SATA drives available are really ATA133 electronics with a SATA interface grafted on. This means that you can connect it to your SATA connections, but you won't get any better performance than the same drive with a IDE connection.

 

[JWade]

WD has a new SATA drive, only 36gb though but is also 10k rpm. Reviews and benchmarks i read on it were pretty good. Cost i saw was 160, making the gb to $ ratio a bit high, but not as high as scsi though.

 

[SinfulWeeper]

Why not a 8mb sata drive? Googlegear seams to have a hoard of them.

 

[4x4expy]

Originally posted by: SinfulWeeper
Why not a 8mb sata drive? Googlegear seams to have a hoard of them.

That is why I asked. I have found SATA drives like the WD Raptor 10krpm, 36gb for $150-160 (or 7200rpm 160gb SATA for around $169) as compared to WD SE 8mb 120gb for $120 or somtimes much less for OEM. I have no doubt the performance of the Raptor is noticably better but I hear that the 8mb cache ata drives are also impressive. Thanks for everyones response.

 

[bgeh]

i'll go with the IDE 8MB drives for now
the SATA drives are still too expensive