SATA

[Dorkenstein]

I'm not going to replace my motherboard in the foreseeable future but I want to experience SATA performance. Is it worth getting a SATA controller card? Or what is the EIDE drive that comes closest? Thanks...

 

[bob4432]

unless you go with a raptor the 7200/8MB sata drives are basically the same drive as a 7200/8MB pata drive with a different connector. i don't think you would see much by just switching from a 7200/8MB pata drive to a 7200/8MB sata drive. the interface is not the bottleneck, the drive hardware is.

i should also ask what is your current m/b, setup?

 

[Dorkenstein]

I have a Soltek SL-75FRN2-L with a Barton 2500+ in it. The hard drive I have is a Hitachi, only 120gb.

 

[bob4432]

does your drive have the 8MB cache? i would say you would not see anything that would offset the $$$ put in.

 

[JackHawksmoor]

From benchmarks that were shown on here or Tom's recently, there's very little difference even between a 4 year old 7200RPM hard drive and a Raptor. There's NO difference between identical drives on PATA or SATA, because no drive comes close to saturating a PATA connection. Using an add-in SATA card could make an equivalent drive SLOWER, because it has to go through the PCI bus. A single drive wouldn't saturate it, but if you have other PCI stuff... If you've got a 120GB drive, it's pretty modern and upgrading it (unless you need additional storage) would be a big waste of money IMO.