SATA Vs PATA drive, same model, different interface

[RU482]

see title.

5400RPM laptop drives.
The computer can use either interface

Would the SATA drive be faster?

 

[Zepper]

It is possible for the SATA version to be a bit faster, but not enough to worry about.

.bh.

 

[Lord Evermore]

Theoretical bandwidth of first generation SATA is 150MBps, 2nd gen is 300MBps, versus 100MBps or 133MBps for the last IDE standards. You can only reach those speeds with burst transfers to and from the hard drive cache though. Even a Raptor 150GB can't sustain more than 90MBps at the outer edge of the drive, and drops to 50MBps on the inner tracks. A laptop drive spinning at just over half the speed of a Raptor is barely going to be able to do 40MBps at the edge.

So you get a few bursts of very high speed data, but then you end up waiting around for the rest of the stuff you needed from the drive.

SATA is the preferred interface, but primarily for the easier to work with cables.